11O
ELLEFeaturePhotography: Julia Kennedy/Trunk Archive.ELLE.COM/UK Nove mbe r 2O19I
F
LIVING THE DREAM
From top: Sarah
Raphael boarding
a private jet; with
Lindsay Lohan at
a party; and at
Refinery 29I smoked on the way to work, drank most nights, took recreational drugs
at weekends and sleeping tablets in the week. I huffed at slow walkers,
late Ubers and baristas who spent too long on my cappuccino. Under
the stress of success, I felt the sweet parts of my personality harden.
In my late twenties, I was approached to be the founding editor
of Refinery29 in the UK. I was in therapy at the time, trying to process
some things that had happened in my family, but I found myself talking
about work more than anything else. I had a few editor job offers on
the table, which I presented to my therapist in the form of pros and cons.
‘But which do you want?’ she asked. The question flummoxed me
because what I wanted was to be a success. ‘It’s a shame, Sarah,’ she
responded. ‘Because that never seemed to make you happy before.’
Does anyone truly enjoy the view from the top of the ladder? It
feels sweet for a few minutes, but there are
so many hidden costs and broken pegs.
I was going through another break-up at
the time, with someone who I felt wasn’t
ambitious enough. In our final goodbye,
he said: ‘I really tried to show you that work
isn’t everything. I don’t think I succeeded.’
After six whirlwind years, I left i-D
to take the Refinery29 role, mainly because
I was in awe of my sharp, funny boss who
articulated herself perfectly at 1OOmph.
She seemed invincible; that was what
I wanted to be. My salary jumped into a
higher tax bracket, I got to pick my team,
and together we started working on the
stories that we felt needed to be told.
Things moved quickly – within a year of
launching, we’d won several awards for
our stories, which were reaching millions
of women – and I was invited to Facebook
and the Cabinet Office to advise their
teams on how to speak to young women.t was all going brilliantly. Yet, the
more brilliantly it went, the more
panicked I felt. I started taking
beta blockers to control my
anxiety about public speaking,
I couldn’t sleep more than two hours a
night. I began to feel less like the charming,
informed woman in the media I was employed to be. I had a recurring
dream where I needed to get to school to sit an exam, but the friction
on the ground was too forceful; I tried to crawl, but made no progress.
And, just like that, I burned out. After three years in the job, and
nearly 1O in the media, the force that had been pushing me forward, that
‘ambition’ I’d always felt as a physical thing driving my body, started to
do a U -turn. Editorial meetings I’d once led with vigour felt intimidating.
I sat at my desk staring blankly at my to-do list, watching hundreds of
emails requiring my attention roll in. I’d run out of ideas. I looked around
the office and couldn’t understand how everyone else was so energetic.
‘You’re talking like you’re 61, not 31,’ Mum said on the phone, hearing
the disillusionment in my voice. I sat with my bosses to explain what was
happening and, though they were supportive – full of inspiring words that
would have made the old me jump up and get to it, desperate to please
and achieve – the new, zombie-me couldn’t hear it. Or didn’t want to.riends and family told me to keep going; after all, I had
the dream job, who wouldn’t want it? I’d always been
conscientious, but all I could think about was running away,
to a place where no one expected anything of me. My new
boyfriend had talked about living abroad – his ambition was
to work in East Africa. Since my ambition appeared to be lost, I decided to
give his a try. I was supposed to be writing a book with a friend, which I’d
been neglecting, so I figured I’d go and live a leisurely writer’s life. A few
weeks later, I handed in my notice, torn between FOMO for the things my
team would achieve without me and the excitement of the unknown ahead.
My dad’s response was predictably brutal, but feminist to the core:
‘I didn’t raise you to be the girlfriend of somebody who has a job in Africa.’
He had a point; I had left the top job at a female-led media company to
move across the world for my boyfriend’s
job. But at that time, I found the idea of not
being the successful one a huge relief.
Just like that, we packed up and went.
Meeting new people in Kenya, however,
I found myself stuttering over the ‘what do
you do?’ question. Writing a book about
social media didn’t feel as impressive
as being an editor of a fashion media
brand, especially compared to the NGO
workers who spent their days advising on
Aids prevention or supporting women
in prisons. Inevitably, in those first few
months, I felt as though, along with my
ambition, I’d lost my identity. If I wasn’t
a hotshot editor, I must be nothing at all.
But, almost impercebtibly, I began to
appreciate the new pace of life. I wrote
the book, went hiking, slept well for the
first time in years. Less ambition started to
feel good. I missed the people I’d worked
with, but I didn’t miss the frantic person I’d
been. Over time, I grew unfazed by the
impressive things my peers were doing,
and more attuned to what I wanted.
I’d had a quiet ambition to become
a psychotherapist for a long time, and
in this new head space, I found the
drive to pursue it. It will take ages (five
years!) to retrain. It’s not going to be
glamorous, and I’ll be the least outwardly successful of my friends. But
I feel excited again, like I’m at the bottom of a mountain that can only be
climbed slowly. The whole point about ambition is that it needs a goal
to exist, but when the goal changed for me, so did the type of ambition.
‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart’,
Albert Camus wrote in The Myth Of Sisyphus. I reached a great height in
my media career, and I’m proud of that, but at the top, my heart felt empty.
These days, I’m the person people call when they’re feeling
disillusioned and wondering whether to run away to a shack on the
beach. More often than not I say, ‘Do it, go see who you are and what
ambition means to you when you’re standing outside of the rat race’.
For me, it meant rediscovering a new, slower-paced ambition that I hope
thrives on the struggle as much as it does on the end goal of success.
Mixed Feelings: Exploring the Emotional Impact of our Digital Habits
by Naomi Shimada and Sarah Raphael is out now