Is there a less embarrassing way to be ambitious?

OR: no, you're right, everyone IS doing better than you and how to get your lick back.

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Sorry, babe, I’m on another spiral. It is common and normal to be in your 20s and feel like you’re falling behind everyone else around you. It is so common and so normal to feel like you missed a class where everyone figured out how to get the dream job, beautiful apartment and the perfect boyfriend that it’s kind of boring. There’s nothing special about feeling inadequate and, yet, each time this monstrous cloud settles over me, it feels like I’m the only person to ever have experienced this. (I’m so main character pilled.)

There’s a Frank Sinatra song that I can’t stop playing (or posting on my Story) where he goes, “You’re riding high in April, shot down in May / But I know I’m gonna change that tune in June.” The beginning of April was the time when I even wrote about a renewed lust for life, where it was cool to be a grown-up adult who cared about structure and discipline and doing your 5-9 after your 9-5 while doing a Sunday reset, drinking enough water, and doing a Soft75 Challenge. That, actually, it’s OK to be an NPC who wants to make money and buy an ugly Wassily chair, and maybe be famous or fly business class to your high school reunion.

But where April was all coming to terms with my mortality (turning 26), getting into a routine, and accomplishing all my silly little tasks, May was all that times 10.

While managing a new 9-5 job, I was also launching a podcast, publishing on Instagram daily, making my bed (everyday, bro), calling my parents on Sundays, baking, seeing my friends, and sewing through the kind of hangovers that could kill the Greek Pantheon. In May alone, I made a holy cow costume, an Edwardian-era slip dress, a Bridgerton costume, 1820s stays, a 1950s style corset, and got started on a huge embroidery project that I’ll just summarise as a Miriam Makeba goes medieval.

okbaddiek

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So it comes as no surprise that by June, I was burnt out. It’s actually in typing all of that now that I wish I understood what my problem was. That’s not a normal output at all but it feels like it comes naturally to everyone else around me. And this is what’s tacky and embarrassing about feeling inadequate. You spend so much time watching everyone run forward that you stand still. You plant your feet in the ground so you can peer at greener grass and look at everything you’re not and don’t have that you can’t give yourself the chance to even attempt it.

On my birthday, I posted that one of the most freeing aspects of getting older was relishing in the fact that you know nothing and once everything is news to you, everything is new to you. But one of the things I know even less now is what I want to do. Like, with my life.

Growing up, I wanted to work in fashion magazines. I studied Ugly Betty, The September Issue and Running In Heels like scripture through high school. I kept a blog, I finessed my way into fashion weeks after Maths and I convinced adults to pay me for my 16-year-old opinions. And then I matriculated and magazines were dead/dying.

So I pivoted.

I wanted to run my own fashion line. I dropped out of fashion school, read Girl Boss at 19, built a website, took a business course, sewed religiously and lost a lot of money. Then a year later, Sophia Amoruso announced Nasty Gal was filing for bankruptcy.

So I pivoted.

Again.

And there was a pandemic. Pivot. Layoffs and a recession. Pivot.

And in all that moving, I didn’t have any direction. There wasn’t so much a clear picture in my mind’s eye as to what the future is supposed to look like as much as there were just the next few steps ahead of me.

The future’s kind of like the horizon. You might be able to see it but you can never reach it. By the time you get to a point you’ve planned, you’re not only in the present but there’s always still more ahead of you. So because ambition has always felt so Sisyphean, it seemed pointless. Why care about achieving anything today if tomorrow, you’re just going to push that damn rock up the hill again?

Well, maybe because it the point is to just push the rock.

Not everyone has the time, freedom or resources to pick up a laborious and tedious hobby but, boy, do I recommend it. The majority of my sewing projects involve a lot of a type of hand sewing called basting. These are temporary stitches used to mark information you need for the final process such as pocket placements, stitch lines, where to fold and where to cut.

You can save time and do a lot of these with a machine but there are places machines can’t reach and sometimes the impact of mechanised needles leaves permanent marks. You can also use erasable fabric markers like chalk or water-soluble pens to do these but depending on your project, it means your markings are only on one side of the fabric and you won’t have that information on the reverse.

The thing about basting, though, is that it’s fucking boring. There is little joy to be found in dedicating whole hours to stitching little lines that will never, ever be seen or appreciated in the final product. But what’s felt isn’t always seen. Even in our heavily industrialised and advanced AI-tech-assisted world, the difference between a quality, couture garment and fast fashion garbage lies in tiresome tasks like this.

Thom Browne’s Autumn ‘24 Collection was a much needed reminder of this (just remembered this is a fashion newsletter). It’s literally an ode to the unglamourous, boring work that goes into couture. Permanent basting stitches, inside-out seams, exposed padding and interlining, and everything in calico (the go-to mock-up or tester fabric).

Thom Browne, Autumn '24 Couture, via Vogue

What makes putting in your 10,000 hours isn’t coming out as some sort of master or expert. It’s the fact that you can do it. If you can push a rock up a hill today, it means that you can do it tomorrow. And if you can push a rock up a hill tomorrow, you can do it the day after that and the day after. And if you can get through a punishment only the gods can bestow, then you can get through anything. And if you can get through anything then you can enjoy anything. Then anything is yours - to find pleasure, to make your own, to take, to give, to start over and reimagine.

So figuring out what I want to do with my life, coming up with “a dream”, or some grand plan doesn't have to be daunting because I might fail at it. I probably will fail at it. But I will survive it.

Back to that Sinatra song I mentioned. The final line is:

But if there’s nothing shaking, come this here July
I’m gonna roll myself up
In a big ball and die
My, my.

I am determined to make it shake this here July. I’m gonna wake up early and make my bed and exercise even though I don’t feel like it.

I’m gonna do the embarrassing thing and let everyone know I want to be good at stuff and I care that people like what I do and I hope to be a somebody.

I will strive for every possibility that enters my mind and I will be the best tryer-outer there ever was.

And if/when the 31st rolls around and I’ve failed spectacularly and terrifically, I still always have tomorrow.

Every day the world ends and every morning it starts again.

Hanger Management is free today, tomorrow, and probably every day after that because social media platforms hate Africans haha. Not that you have to but if you’d like to support me financially, you can donate any amount to my tip jar. Your contribution goes toward financing my media subscriptions, research costs, materials for sewing projects, paying my podcast editor, the odd cold one or two, and pressuring me into producing more.

You know you love me
xoxo