Ambition is Oxford’s patron deity. She haunts every conversation and every identity crisis. Each personal connection that we make is a divine conduit in her honour, be it for the first-preference Union vote or the slimmest chance of a nepo-adjacent summer internship. We forge student societies, startups, and LinkedIn posts in her name, doing anything and everything to fill that intimate, gaping want of her own creation. What separates the blessed and the forsaken is something Stygian.
Chatter falters when I admit that I am completely lost. It’s inherently un-Oxonian of me, unbecoming in a way that causes gazes to quietly and condescendingly glaze over. I have no internship lined up, no resume-worthy job, no spring week, no niche in my degree that has yet impassioned me deeply or determined my life’s trajectory. There is nothing which I particularly excel at; any blown-up assumptions that I had regarding my own talents before Oxford, now lie in ruins. There have been open doors to opportunities which I carelessly overlooked, paths I was (and still am) too afraid to take, golden chances which I let slip through my fingers, lost to little vices of time mismanagement and poor discipline. I feel my social value plummet like a stock market crash – a phantom pain mostly imagined, but also a little real.
It isn’t burnout, or maybe it is. Perhaps I’m ashamed of what it might mean, to have been capable of so little that my cup has run dry already; short wicks are of no use for prayers to vast gods. I cannot stomach looking into the faces of strangers and friends alike, and seeing the confines they have resigned me to: a life adrift, an empty vessel, hurtling towards mediocrity.
I am being entirely dramatic and too flowery – the first year simply doesn’t count, this imagery makes little sense, and no one is actually looking at me like that. Perhaps what I truly cannot stomach is myself. My goddess has abandoned me. And as I look, stranded, to the other bank across the river – at eyes alight with aspiration and endeavour, that intrinsic zeal of the soul – I realise I am fundamentally lacking.
Many of us get used to the idea that we are exceptional: exceptionally smart, driven, gifted, ambitious. In reality, it’s all mythmaking. Growing up, showing the slightest bit of initiative got me marked as anomalous. Venturing into the world of triple-digit multiplication in primary school, researching axolotls instead of common fish for biology projects, having opinions in history lessons. When surrounded by inertia, the smallest movement becomes magnified; with it comes easy recognition, and easier praise. The rush of admiration strikes skin-deep; for so long, I have been trapped in its thrall.
I do not remember when I started doing and achieving for the sake of approval, instead of for my own self; it cages you, hallucinating a fake, self-imposed limit of satiation where you stand out just enough, the external recognition hits, and the passion stagnates. I find nothing within me, because I have always sought outwards. I mistook validation for ambition in my idol worship, honouring a false god that has left me hollow. Of course my goddess has left me – for so long, I have shunned her.
And yet, I hope. My body recalls her blessing, and the gaping wound of its loss; in her remembrance, I always hunger. I write this plea amidst the lonely company of a hundred idle internet tabs – internship applications left in eternal, lazy incompletion, tutor comments on passable subject essays and problem sheets, Outlook and Gmail inboxes heavy with the silence of rejections and never-hearing-backs. Nothing is in me, yet everything is on my mind; I write this as a hymn. Crashing out is an act of devotion.
In some deep, buried corner of my mind, I am still the girl who wrote bizarre poetry about chameleons and the migration patterns of monarch butterflies for a creative writing assignment in the 3rd grade, who had been promised by her all-too-awed teacher that she would do great things in the world. At a time before I learnt the meaning of ‘good enough’, and the dangers of dreaming. I am that girl, and she is me, and identity is a strictly transitive relation. Whatever great unknown I careen towards (and it will be great), in whatever constant pursuit, I will always be anchored in these memories of limitlessness.
I still see my deity in my dreams. I am wading the water, forever reaching. Even as I falter in the depths and stumble across whirlpools, my disquiet is my meditation. In my penance, my goddess will return to me.