ambition made me lonelier than heartbreak ever did

on outgrowing people, environments & realising your future no longer fits inside the rooms that raised you.

my news was good. their reaction was technically fine. and yet something in me went completely still, because i knew - the way you always know, that i had just lost something.

i have lost more friendships to growth than i have to falling outs. no big fight, no betrayal, no clean ending to point to. just a slow drift. just two people becoming increasingly incompatible until one day you realize you are only still in contact out of loyalty to a version of the relationship that no longer exists.

i used to think something was wrong with me for that. everybody else seemed to have these groups they carried through every phase of life like it was nothing. meanwhile my social world shed people every time i leveled up. i used to wonder what it felt like to stay the same enough that everyone kept recognizing you.

i do not wonder that anymore.

it’s so subtle you almost gaslight yourself out of noticing it

you share an opportunity and the excitement comes back slightly off. technically the right words, but emotionally they are already somewhere else. you start achieving things and the jokes get sharper. your failures get brought up more often. people stop asking about your work altogether. conversations that used to feel easy start carrying this low-grade tension you cannot quite name.

i remember telling a close friend about something i had been building for months. something i was genuinely proud of. and instead of asking a single question about it, they spent the next twenty minutes talking about why it probably would not work. not maliciously. not even consciously. but i sat there thinking - you needed me to fail at this. you needed me to come back with bad news so we could commiserate together the way we used to.

that realization broke something in me a little.

because i would have celebrated that person endlessly. i would have shown up for every version of their success. and the asymmetry of that is a grief you’re not even sure you know how to categorize.

the truth is, some people only feel safe in relationships where both people are stuck at the same level. not because they are evil. because your movement makes them aware of their own stillness. and that awareness is uncomfortable. so unconsciously, they start creating friction. start pulling you back toward familiar ground. start punishing your growth in ways subtle enough that you spend weeks wondering if you imagined it.

ambitious women feel this constantly. but honestly, ambitious people in general, men included - anyone who is quietly outpacing their environment knows this feeling. it does not discriminate.

and the cruelest version of that friction is not silence. it is the people who come with words.

i often find myself in conversations where my friends have told me i dream too big. genuinely. not as a compliment. as a diagnosis. like wanting an extraordinary life was a symptom of something. like aiming high was embarrassing, a sign i had lost touch with reality instead of evidence that i was deeply committed to changing it.

“be realistic. be practical. that probably will not happen.”

and every single time i heard something like that, something in me recoiled so hard i could not even respond. because what do you mean it is not possible? there are people building companies from nothing right now. people moving across the world alone and rebuilding their entire lives. people dismantling generational cycles of limitation because they simply refused to inherit the same mental ceiling as everyone around them. people doing the exact thing you are calling impossible before they turn thirty.

how do you look at the full scale of what human beings are capable of and still choose to live like your life has already reached its limit?

that mindset has always felt genuinely insane to me.

and eventually i stopped believing they were trying to protect me from disappointment. they were protecting their own worldview from being challenged. because if i actually went after what i said i wanted, and it worked, they would have to sit with the possibility that they could have wanted more too. that the ceiling they accepted was never actually there.

and that realization might be the loneliest part of all of it. not the drift, not the silence, not the half-second delay before the smile. but looking around and realizing how small most people’s imagination for their own life actually is. and how desperately they need yours to stay small too.

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letters from nush runs on caffeine and the life left in me after being a full time woman in tech, support my work and keep the coffee coming <3

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i am exhausted by the grief of it, if i am being honest

i am tired of grieving people who are still alive. i am tired of the slow fade. tired of pretending i do not notice when the energy shifts. tired of making myself smaller in conversations so nobody feels the gap. tired of the loneliness that comes not from being alone but from being in rooms full of people and still feeling completely unreachable.

ambition creates a weirdly specific type of isolation. it is not just logistical, though that is real too. the cancelled plans and the weekends that disappear into work and the brain that never fully shuts off. it is emotional. it is craving depth so badly that surface-level conversation starts feeling physically exhausting. it is wanting to talk about what you are building, what you are afraid of, what you are becoming and hitting a wall every time because the people around you are not living in that register.

some nights i genuinely just want to switch it off. want to exist casually without this relentless internal pressure. without seeing potential in everything including myself, especially myself, which sounds like a gift and often is, but sometimes just feels like a sentence.

but here is what i have come to understand after enough cycles of this:

outgrowing people is not arrogance. it is not superiority. it is alignment. it is the simple, painful reality that growth changes what you need from connection, and not every relationship can hold the new weight of who you are becoming.

some friendships were only ever held together by shared stagnation. by bonding over being stuck in the same place. and once one person starts moving, there is nothing left underneath it.

that is not anyone’s fault. but it is still a loss.

compatibility becomes rarer the further you go. not because you become difficult or cold or too good for anyone. because you need specific things now. people who understand obsession. people who can sit with you in the discomfort of wanting more without making you feel guilty for it. people who clap for you without quietly grieving their own lack of movement at the same time. people who are not threatened by your discipline, your focus, your refusal to keep shrinking yourself to keep the peace.

those people exist. i promise they do. but there are not many of them, and you will not find them by staying in rooms that punish you for growing.

the loneliness of becoming is real. i will not romanticize it.

but i would take that loneliness every single time over spending my life surrounded by people who only feel comfortable around the watered-down version of me.

because eventually , and i mean this, shrinking yourself to maintain connection starts feeling lonelier than being alone ever could.

happy being unapologetically you,

yours lovingly,

Nush <3