Everyone knows you’re not supposed to visit the grocery store famished, because you’ll want to eat every single thing you see. Sometimes my ambition felt like that. I wanted everything because I hadn’t satisfied my hunger elsewhere. Or rather, what other people called ambition often felt—to me—more like justifying my own existence. If I’d failed at happiness, then success seemed like a consolation prize. As if some tribunal in the afterlife would ask, Were you happy? And I could say, Well, no. But I did all this.
