welcome to kate's world!

I have been an ambitious person my whole life. as a child i worked hard in school, played hard in sports, learned multiple instruments, and kept all my ducks rowed. I was responsible, my room was spotless, and my shit was together. In college i worked hard to maintain my gpa, gave too much of myself to my sorority and its BETTERMENT, worked campus jobs during the school year and had internships in the summer, and kept all my ducks in nervous rows. I was responsible and anxious, with a still spotless room and my shit together – but feeling heavier. THis is the didactic story of the ten-ish complicated months after i graduated college in may 2024 and the proceeding year to now, march 2026.

i didn’t have a job lined up after college. i had put all my eggs in one basket but this happened and that happened and i couldn’t control anything about it, so i moved home in may with nothing to feel ambitious over, other than a job search, an ABRUPT crash to an active social life, a budding fear over how it looked that i – kate taylor – – ambitious overachiever -, did not have a prospect of much on the horizon, and, my favorite, a fragile sense of self.

I was lonely, depressed, anxious, self CONSCIOUS, worried, listless, angry, stressed, and, as i later described to my therapist, empty. there was so much about my circumstances that I could not change; it took until september that i realized I needed climb out of my pit and change what i could change. I remember the day: i was sitting in my car, after working out at the ymca, and i was crying. I felt so helpless and so trapped by that helplessness. I REMEMBER thinking, “this cannot be my life.” was it DISBELIEF or a call to action? perhaps both. I was wearing red and i texted my therapist in that moment.

Now i’m going to fast forward to march of the following year. I’ve been in therapy for about six months, i finally got a job – a good job – in January, and i’m moving out of my parents’ house in april. things have turned around, it seems. throughout the next year, I will make the best friends I have ever had, fall in love with my neighborhood and living alone, become a raver (?), go on too many dates to count, try new RESTAURANTS and bars all over my city, start taking figure skating lessons and get really into it, do stand up comedy, travel, read more books than i’ve read in my entire life, GET MY GRADUATE CERTIFICATE, get a new – really good – job, throw parties, adopt my baby (zuzu), and live the life i have -literally- always dreamed about. Throughout the next year, i will, also, lose my ambition for career success and tamper my need to overachieve, care less and less about what others think of me, live slower, find passion in creating and fostering relationships, reconnect with my creative side and start creating in brand new ways, discover my truest, most honest self and really live quite freely in it, with it.

So what changed? a lot of things. like i just said in the previous paragraph: a lot of things. each thing brought something: growth, gifts, GRATITUDE, other G words, too. together they made me feel real, UNBRIDLED joy. I think i’ve felt that kind of joy before this past year, but i don’t think i took enough stock of it. this time i named it mine and took it home with me, recognizing it for the rare, lifeblood, reason we exist, purpose of life, seeing your soul for the first time maybe joy it is. i feel like i know something others don’t: that the point of life is not anything in particular at all, it is the pursuit of creating and experiencing this joy as much as you can until you are dust. i know it in my bones and i realize maybe this is how others feel about god, perhaps this is faith. I also realize that like others, i also believe i am right.

Now, when i think of ambition it is magic, a rainbow of colors, a loud apartment, laughter and smiles. It is connection, freedom, passion. it is joy. I am ambitious in my PURSUIT of it all.

it is all i will ever be ambitious for.