This One's For My Idea Monsters

First, before we do anything, I have to take you up a mountain in the wrong fucking shoes, which is how I do everything, it seems.

When I was nineteen, maybe twenty, the boy I loved and the first one I’d go on to marry — there have been a few — called to say he had a surprise for me. He was so committed to the surprise, in fact, that he didn’t call me. He called my roommates, who were also my closest friends, and rallied them to get me ready without telling me what was happening. We were all aflutter! A man who organises A Thing via friends — this is rom-com territory! This was no doubt going to epically romantic, legendary, iconic, the thing you writes stories about and get ready for, with care. So I did. I did my hair, I did my face, and I put on my cutest new shit. I remember it exactly: an oversized burgundy-and-cream rugby shirt, a very short pleated plaid skirt in the same burgundy, the hem of the shirt almost meeting the hem of the skirt, burgundy lug-sole Mary Janes, knee socks. I was fucking adorable and ready to go OUT-out. (This was 1992 and baby, I’d wear it tonight.)

He rolled up on a brand-new-to-him motorcycle with a second helmet. Surprise!

I was indeed surprised and so was my mini-skirt. I changed into huge oversized cream Levi’s, slowly and resentfully with a lot of bad words unsaid but running like a ticker tape through my brain, while motorcycle man tried valiantly to talk me out of my Mary-Janes. He failed.

The motorcycle was more thrilling in theory than in practice, at least for me; for me it was mostly terrifying. We’d keep that bike for years. It became a thing we did, apparently because it was fun, because it was “us.”

That was Part One of The Surprise. How his motorcycle — a thing he wanted, that I had never shown one flicker of interest in, ever, a gift to himself from himself — became a surprise occasion for me is one of those mysteries we work out in feminist rage books, so we’ll save that for then. I definitely have a few in me. Onward.

Part Two of The Surprise required an hour up the winding, mountainous, often treacherous Malahat Highway in a damp grey drizzle — on the motorcycle, remember, in a rugby shirt — to reach the exciting, surprising place I had done my face for.

Dear Reader, the place was the base of a hiking trail.

Dear Reader, I hate hiking.

And so we hiked. In burgundy Mary Janes and cream Levi’s, in the wet, in a rugby shirt, for hours. We reached the first plateau — a sort-of fake summit — where there was people resting on rocks, a sudden break of sun, the rain easing, a clear body of water where people were swimming and romping, chipmunks taking trail mix out of strangers’ hands, which was the first fucking thing all day I actually got excited about and wanted to do.

We, of course, had no trail mix. Also no water. Another surprise.

It was lovely there, genuinely lovely, and I could not enjoy a single second of it, because by then I had one objective and it was the summit. This was, apparently, a famous hike — so famous you surprise a girl who hates hiking with it and no trail mix and expect her to be rom-com wowed— with an even more famous view at the top, and this nice halfway fake-summit plateau, with all its sun and water and chipmunks and rest, was not that view. So fuck this plateau. Let’s go.

I rushed us to the top. I took in what there was to take in for the entire thirty-eight seconds a 360-degree panoramic head-swivel requires, and then I was done. Honestly I was one the second I had to change out of my skirt but now I was done-done. Time to wine me and dine me somewhere warm now that my hair is wrecked from the helmet and I’ve sweated off my blush.

What I’m saying is, I was wildly, monstrously ungrateful for the whole day he’d built — for the bike, for the hike, for the lack of glamour, for the absence of water and snacks, even for the pretty plateau and chipmunks I could’ve enjoyed if only there’d been trail mix, but who are we kidding, I’d have rushed the summit anyway. I didn’t care where we’d arrived or how hard we’d worked to get there. I had my eyes and my heart and my whole being set on the next thing. The best thing. The tippy-top.

That is what it is to be an ambition monster.

We make the climb — usually in the wrong shoes — and we arrive somewhere we’ve genuinely come so far to reach, somewhere things could be good, somewhere things are good, and we look around at the sun and the water and the rest and we say: nope. Not it. Not good enough. What’s next.

Even when we make ourselves stay, we don’t want to be there. We’ll pitch a tent on the plateau, start building a cabin, make the place nice — and we’ll do it half-brained, maybe less than half, because the whole time we’re calculating the route to the summit while the building and the tending of everything we’ve already got takes everything we’ve got.

And the path up — maybe there’s no map. Maybe we’ve been trained to believe the summit is for another kind of people, better people. Summit people. Without the map, the signposts, anyone who looks like us already standing at the top, we don’t know if it’s even possible for us. So we say we don’t know how to get there. We say we’re not even sure we want to.

We fucking want to.

We know it and we won’t say it, and we can’t rest on the plateau, plateauing is a fucking disease, and we won’t stop pushing and trying to prove something, because when you come from where we come from you have everything to prove, mostly to yourself.

I have built a life the girl I used to be - the one who pretended to be delighted by mountains and motorcycles — would not believe. I clawed my way out of poverty. I was the first in my family to finish university. I built a business from my kitchen table at night while my toddlers slept, from nothing, with no child support, no support of any kind, nada. I have a body of work and a career I built from pure desperation and brain power, 3 acres of land I bought by myself with that brain-made money, a (third) marriage I rebuilt from a power struggle into something close to mutual worship and abiding romantic obsession, and children I mother differently than I was mothered. By any accounting, I have done a great deal.

And, like that plateau on the mountain, it still feels small. Not against other people — against what I want, against where I’m certain I belong.

Nobody actually calls desiring, discontent women like us monsters anymore. Not out loud, not to our faces; it isn’t 1850 . But try saying I want to be somebody. I want more. What I’ve built is not enough and I am hungry for the summit. It comes out of your mouth feeling obscene. Grasping. Arrogant. Ungrateful. Unbecoming. Monstrous. And it feels that way not because it’s wrong but because it violates every piece of feminine conditioning you were ever handed: be content, be grateful, be of service, want less, take up less, make everyone comfortable, wear the right shoes, never let them catch you reading or worse, reaching. To admit the size of your epic wanting is to break all of it at once. That’s why monster is the right word even when no one says it. The monstrousness is in the truth that the wanting exists at all — and it gets more monstrous the second you admit it out loud. Say it anyway, you monster.