At 25, I No Longer Care About Achieving Anything
I threw away my career — abandoned my dreams — and I’m so much happier now
I’m writing this at 5:30am in Saranda, Albania — two days after my 25th birthday. I sit on a balcony watching the locals head out for their day, and the tourists stumble in from their nights. Motorbikes, cars and dogs pass on the street below, and I find myself thinking…
Holy sh*t — I’m a long way from where I was born!
The Beginning
I grew up in Australia. All the way at the bottom of the globe. Under hot suns and dreary winters. I played in red dirt as a child. Woke up to magpies every morning. Learned to speak in a twanging accent, and never really strayed too far from home.
The first 15 years of my life were spent in rural Victoria. I went to kindergarten with the same group of kids I graduated high school with. I did dance lessons, tried to write novels and eventually, found myself falling into photography.
I had a good childhood — surrounded by trees and known faces. I was shielded from a lot of the world, but never too much that I feared it.
But I always craved more. To do more. Be more.
I distinctly remember sitting in the bathroom, at about 10, puzzled by the burning need inside of me to just get on with life. I wanted to work, to earn money, to be able to buy things. I suppose I wanted to have more control. At the time, I reasoned that that feeling could only be explained by one of two things:
- either I was a 26 year old woman trapped in a 10 year old’s body, or…
- I was an alien.
Both seemed like pretty reasonable explanations at the time.
When I went to university, my need to “be more” grew exponentially. My 18th birthday arrived and brought with it a more intense sense of urgency than I’d ever experienced before.
For years before I’d dreamed of being excellent. Becoming a child prodigy — being the youngest bestselling author, selling millions of books and garnering fame. But my childhood always seemed to distract me. Now that I was 18, I was an adult — both in the eyes of the state and my mother. At the time, that meant I couldn’t fluff around anymore. I’d missed my chance to be a prodigy, but I could still be successful…right?
Bumping Shoulders With The Famous
I went to university for photography. By this point, I’d lost confidence in my writing and had abandoned it for another dream. My hopes moved to photography instead. I believed I could craft stories and make good money, all far more quickly than I ever could writing novels.
Almost immediately, I started brushing shoulders with models, dancers and actors. I thrust myself into the mentorships of photographers who had earned their place amongst them.
I was in love. I saw the world open up to me for the first time. I’d found myself behind the curtain of fame and fortune — learning names, hearing stories. I was lightyears away from the quiet shelter of my childhood, and it felt so good.
This was the point where my ego was highest. My need for achievement was finally being fed. I was doing something none of my friends from school did. I was “making something of myself”. Little did I know, I was growing a monster.
In 2019, I graduated. After 3 years of constant photoshoots, networking and assisting on the side, I was done with uni. I stood there at my graduation exhibition, my boyfriend at my side, a new puppy at home, and waited for my whole life to come together for me.
It didn’t.
No one came to see my work — no new industry connections were made. No mysterious stranger who saw my raw potential and immediately offered to sign me to their agency.
Realistically, the night kind of just fizzled out. But I refused to let it interrupt my dreams. I continued working — got a studio job, tried to find more assisting work. I shot in my free time — applied for freelance jobs. Burnt myself out working in a family photography studio. And then covid came.
Four months after I graduated, the entire Australian photography industry was shut down.
I think by now, a lot of us are sick of talking about the C word. So I won’t. All you need to know is that in the space of two years, the Melbourne photography industry was shut down sporadically for over ten months total. What resulted were huge lulls to work, followed by a mad rush to make money and fulfil demand, only to be shut down again. Everyone was going mad — trying to keep their clients and make enough money to support themselves. Meanwhile, most of the big ticket commercial work was happily moving to Sydney, where they were allowed to work uninterrupted.
Let’s just say, that raging fire of ambition I had, was struggling to stay alight. And in its absence, guilt moved in.
I still wanted to be successful — to be admired. I tried so hard to get my career going. But there came a time when the dream I had chased for five years suddenly didn’t look as good. I wanted a good life — one filled with adventure. I wanted to impact people for the better, and I just wasn’t doing that as a photography assistant. Or even in my freelance jobs. I was tired of lifting heavy equipment around for minimum wage. I was fed up with the politics of fast fashion companies and gallery owners.
I needed to do something different, but to do that meant giving up all the admiration I had earnt.
Giving It All Up
In early 2022, my partner and I got on a plane heading to Tirana, Albania. Our two dogs, Marvin and Newton, were going to meet us in Athens two weeks later.
We’d sealed the deal, sold our stuff and became digital nomads.
It wasn’t a decision that was taken lightly in my family. As an Australian, to move to Europe means not seeing your family for years. Many hours were spent trying to convince us to stay. But as the day of our departure drew near, the inevitable set in.
My parents had always been supportive in the past. Even when I decided to go to art school. But by the time our departure arrived, all the admiration had been sucked out of the room. Only fear remained.
It was then that I learnt my first big lesson of self awareness.
At 24, my career abandoned, my parents just short of estranged — a whole world opened up to me, whilst another slammed shut. For the first time in my life, my need to be more, to be admired, was so starved, so painful that I could no longer ignore it.
I had no way of feeding it. No way to make the feeling go away.
I had no choice.
For the first time ever, I had to stare myself in the face and ask why.
Why do you insist on being so much?
Why do you feel this need to be worthy? To achieve?
Why on earth is this what keeps you up at night?
It took me another 18 months to answer any of these questions. But I hope the answer is so universal that even you could benefit from it.
The Answer
We all have lenses through which we look at life. To some degree we are aware of them, but we lack a universal language to really communicate it with each other. We find ourselves acting and reacting in certain ways that we know are unhealthy, but we don’t know why.
I found myself dedicating my whole life to protecting one idea — that I am worthy.
Many people find themselves doing a similar thing.
You see, there are three lenses through which we value everything in life.
- Systemic = rules and regulations
(emphasising personal comfort and safety) - Extrinsic = social comparison
(emphasising social dynamics or feeling such as shame, guilt, pride, etc) - Intrinsic = inherit and infinite potential
(emphasising the growth and exploration of something, someone, or even, yourself)
Most of us spend our whole lives through an extrinsic lens. We eat, sleep and work around people. We were raised by people, learnt from people and survive because of our relationships with people. It’s only natural that we value so much in our lives based off of how we measure against each other — how we compare to our peers. What our friends, family and (sometimes more so) strangers think of us matters to us.
The problem with this is pretty obvious in hindsight. If you value your life primarily through the extrinsic lens, then you end up cutting off parts of yourself in order to maintain or gain value.
You try to charm, put on a face and present only the part of you that you know someone will admire. You become dogmatic on an idea of yourself — are pained when you can’t maintain it. You start living your life in two places — split between where you are and where you want to be. Unable to ever fully enjoy life until you fulfil an unreachable ideal. And even if you’re so lucky to reach it, you remain at the mercy of how others’ receive you.
At best, you immediately find a new ideal to chase. At worse, you discover the ideal you’ve dedicated years of your life to was never what you wanted in the first place.
So what’s the alternative? For all its flaws, social comparison is still a powerful motivator, right? It keeps us moving and progressing in life. You can’t expect us to give that up!
This is where I’ve always gotten stuck in the past. Right on the precipice, unable to let go of the illusion of control that I’d so perfectly crafted for myself.
You see, extrinsic value is like a drug to us humans. We’re social animals built for communication and collaboration. But we often forget we are also explorers. Tinkerers. Scientists. We are the apes who were curious enough to step down from the trees and pick up a rock. We were born to explore.
That’s the alternative: exploration.
Not nihilism, chaos or denial.
Pure, inherit, infinite exploration.
The exploration of life, ourselves, our loved ones, strangers. Of the universe, the ocean, the atom. The exploration of how we feel, why we get angry, what we are trying to protect. Of art, communication, culture. Of our children, our wives, the infinite internal worlds of each and every person we meet, or will never meet.
To live through an exploratory lens, an intrinsic lens, is to always put curiosity first. It’s to ask why. It’s to be present. And best of all, it’s to always keep moving. Always continue growing and progressing — much more so than the confines of extrinsic value would ever allow us.
Creating Emotional Clarity
For most of my life, I felt that overwhelming need to feel valuable because I was chin deep in extrinsic value. I needed desperately to be so much, not because of a hunger for life, but because I feared what it would mean to be worthless. My ambition wasn’t fueled by passion. If it were, I never would have stopped writing. I would have never pushed myself past breaking point. I would have never cut off parts of myself to fit in with my colleagues better. And I sure wouldn’t have felt nearly as competitive when it came to getting photography jobs.
Everything I did, every decision I made, was for the sake of strengthening how I viewed myself through an extrinsic lens.
I was measuring myself, when I could have simply been exploring.
It took me…
- Abandoning my dream career
- Moving across the globe
- 18 months of constant travel — learning new languages, cultures, customs
- And a hell of a lot of reflection
…to get me to finally let go of my need to be admired. Don’t get me wrong, it’d be nice. But these days I try to focus on being curious instead. I do my best to look at everything in life through an explorative lens — asking myself “what if?”
What if you tried the same?
Keep growing, Ellisha x
P.S. I have a self-assessment tool that can help you gain some emotional clarity in just 10 minutes. Go to my website to try it for free.
