An Ode to Ambition

"When there is a will, there is a way..."

Anyone heard that line before? It is one of my favourite clichéd, life lessons in one sentence kind of lines. Why? Because I have lived by it as much as I can.

Take for example, the time when my favourite horse Katie cut her leg open when she got caught in a fence. While my parents agreed to not put her down, they didn't hold much hope for her. Basically, it was me who kept her from going back to her former home. Every morning, I'd get up and rub honey on the wound. When she got a bit better, I started riding her in light work. When we got tired of that, I started jumping her to stretch her leg. And where could we go from there? Maybe to the races. Now she'd never been the fastest horse. And I had this thing where my favourite horses would always be the slow ones that would eventually leave us. But I thought that Katie might have something in her. People would always take one look at her leg and tell us that it was cruel to race her - but if we didn't, she would have gone crazy. She went on to win two races.

While I'm the first to admit I wasn't the driving force behind her winning two races (although I did take the two bottles of wine we got from them, which remain unopened in my room), there were a great deal of things involved that made the two victories ever so sweet. Drive, hard work, passion, love, but most of all, ambition.

Right now, I'm at the beginning of my second to last year of high school. It is like I'm standing in a city, looking up at the skyscrapers, and wondering how the heck I'm going to get to the top. And that scares me. I'm not the kind of girl who looks to the past and hopes for it to replicate itself. I am the kind of girl who always looks into the future - as you may be able to tell with my refusal to look at just highly-revered older films as the best films of all time, I seek out the new stuff and predict that they'll have a similar future. I worry about the future often. I worry that maybe things won't go right, that I won't get what I want. And most of the time, I don't. But there's this thing called ambition. Sometimes, it never gets fulfilled. But on the occasional chance that it does, the failures in the past and the work put into that fulfilment always outweigh anything in my world.

At the risk of sounding self-obsessed, I'll admit that I have achieved quite a bit in the last year or so. Someone actually said to me "what is there left for you to achieve?" They were sweet achievements too. I had spent a whole lot of time wondering how I could be better at what I do, thinking I wasn't good enough, but not giving up. I don't give up unless I have a really good reason to. I do think pessimistically sometimes, but is pessimism going to get me the results that I want? No. Realism might. More often than not, though, 'when there is a will, there is a way' got the better of me.

One thing that is going to test my ambition, though, is a new job which I got earlier this week. I got announced as the director of our school production. I'd half-heartedly put my name down the week before, thinking I would not get it. I had very good reason to think that way - usually year 13s, not year 12s, are chosen for such a job and to be honest, unless you read the local paper, I'm not that well known around the school. But here, it has happened, and I have a big future to look ahead to now.

This is not our average kind of school production. There's a much bigger budget, we have a bigger hall, a bigger production to do. When it gets going, it is going to be every single night, overseeing everything. I'm not going to have a life outside of school at all. Somehow, I don't mind all that much. Sure, my ultra-secret project will have to be delayed and this blog won't get as much love as it used to (which is a shame, I was hoping for some LAMMYs this year, haha). But every time I've been in a production, I've loved getting on stage after all of that hard work. And I know that this time, my ambitions will be fulfilled.

Plus, this is good for what I want to do when I 'grow up'. Yeah, I still want to be a director of films. Mainly because I don't want to be in a job that feels like a routine. I want to be in a job where ambition is the best way you can succeed. I'm an ambitious wee lassie, and it would take a lot for me to give up.

After all, if a guy like Michael Bay can make shit-tacular's like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, then who says I can't pick up a camera and shoot some robots?

I always feel bad about posting personal things, but I felt like this needs to be said. Soooooorry!