The Museum of Former Ambitions
In a cupboard downstairs, I have a set of watercolour paints. They are very good watercolour paints. This is important because there is no point in failing to become an artist with inferior materials.
I bought them during a period when I believed I might paint. Not professionally, obviously. I had no plans to exhibit at the Tate. I simply imagined becoming the sort of woman who spent quiet Sunday afternoons producing delicate studies of pears.
This version of me wore a large white shirt. There was classical music playing. The light was excellent. I bought the shirt in preparation.
Actual me painted something that looked less like a pear than a medical event, rinsed the brush and put everything away.
The paints have remained in the cupboard ever since.
They are not alone.
My house contains an unofficial museum devoted to people I once intended to become. There are books for learning French, purchased before trips on which I continued to communicate by smiling apologetically and pointing. There is exercise equipment designed to produce muscles I apparently expected to develop while avoiding the equipment itself. There are notebooks assigned to abandoned projects, business ideas and complete personal reinventions.
Somewhere, I still have a calligraphy pen. I do not remember wanting to learn calligraphy, but the evidence is difficult to dispute.
Most of us have such a collection. The guitar in the closet. The half-knitted scarf. The sourdough starter that briefly became the neediest member of the household. The online course we purchased because it was 40 per cent off and then saved the remaining 60 per cent by never taking it.
There are domain names registered during optimistic weekends. Gardening tools bought by people who believed this would be the year they stayed ahead of the weeds. Dresses intended for lives with more invitations. Cookbooks belonging to households where someone prepares dinner on Tuesday using preserved lemon.
Each object was purchased at the small, thrilling moment between imagining a life and having to live it.
This is where former ambitions begin: not as failures, but as possibilities.
For a little while, you can see the whole thing. You will learn Italian. Start a podcast. Run a marathon. Become knowledgeable about wine. Write every morning. Grow dahlias. Play the piano again. Make your own pasta.
The future self appears in exquisite detail. She is focused and energetic. She finishes what she starts. She has somehow acquired several additional hours each day and no longer spends any of them looking for her reading glasses.
Then real life resumes.
The guitar requires practice. The novel develops structural problems. The garden attracts slugs. The podcast requires a microphone, editing software and the horrifying discovery that one’s recorded voice sounds nothing like the voice inside one’s head.
Ambition, which was so elegant in the shop, becomes repetitive at home. Eventually, the supplies migrate to a cupboard.
I used to feel bad about these things. Every abandoned hobby seemed to present a minor character reference. The paints did not merely sit there. They accused. The French books had questions. The unused running belt appeared particularly smug for something with no discernible purpose beyond holding half a banana.
I thought all of it represented a lack of discipline. Other people chose an ambition and steadily pursued it. I chose one, researched it extensively, purchased the accessories and became interested in something else.
But I have started to wonder whether we are too quick to turn former ambitions into evidence against ourselves.
Not every abandoned plan was a promise. Sometimes it was an experiment.
You tried the pottery class and discovered that you do not enjoy pottery. This is useful information. Clay is no longer taking up imaginary space in your future. You took the photography course and liked photography, but not enough to spend every family event looking through a lens while everyone else ate the cake. You started running and realized that you would rather walk. You planted vegetables and discovered that purchasing a tomato is considerably easier than entering into a three-month relationship with one.
These are not necessarily failures. They are lives investigated and, in some cases, wisely declined.
There is an enormous amount of cultural enthusiasm for persistence. We admire people who keep going. We tell children not to quit. We repeat sayings about winners and perseverance, usually while quietly cancelling a subscription to something we stopped using eleven months ago.
But persistence is not automatically virtuous. Sometimes quitting is simply the moment when new evidence meets an old idea.
Perhaps you do not want to play the guitar. Perhaps you wanted to be someone who played the guitar, which is a different ambition entirely.
Many of my former ambitions were less about the activity than the person I associated with it. The woman who paints is observant. The woman who speaks French is sophisticated. The woman who grows vegetables is grounded. The woman who makes pasta has both time and forearm strength.
What I wanted was not always the hobby. It was the quality I thought the hobby would confer.
This is slightly embarrassing, but also clarifying. You can become observant without painting a pear. You can be sophisticated without successfully ordering a train ticket in French. You can be grounded while buying tomatoes grown by someone with a far stronger commitment to agriculture. The identity may still be available, even when the equipment is not required.
Of course, some former ambitions are harder to look at. There are dreams we did not casually outgrow. The business that never became viable. The career we trained for but could not sustain. The marriage, the move, the version of family life we thought we were building.
These do not fit neatly beside the calligraphy pen. They carry grief. Sometimes shame. Sometimes the unsettling knowledge that we worked very hard and it still did not happen.
It is tempting to hide these exhibits in the museum basement. But they belong to the collection too.
A former ambition can matter even if it did not become a permanent life. It shaped decisions. It developed skills. It introduced people. It revealed capacity. It may have brought us partway toward something we could not yet name.
Or it may simply have ended. We are allowed to have wanted something deeply and no longer want it. We are allowed to change our minds without proving the original desire was foolish.
The museum does not need to become a courtroom.
I am now considering what to do with the actual objects. Some should go. Some can be given to people whose ambition is still alive. And some, I think, may stay.
Not because I am definitely going to return to watercolour painting. The pear and I have both been through enough.
But I like the paints. They remind me of a Sunday afternoon when I briefly believed I might become someone else, and sat down long enough.
~ Danielle