The poet David Whyte once said that “ambition is a word that lacks ambition.” I take him to mean that the way we usually use ambition—career, status, the next big thing—is actually smaller than the larger undertaking of a life. The real question is not “What am I achieving?” but “Who am I becoming as I achieve it?”

That sounds lofty and poetic. In practice, it can look like standing in your kitchen asking yourself a very unpoetic question: Did I become this woman’s legal representative because it was my purpose, or because it made me feel like a good person?

I tell this story in my memoir Easy Street: A Story of Redemption from Myself, but I keep circling back to it, because it is the clearest X-ray I have of my own “self-perception management.”

Here is the short version.

My husband met a 75-year-old woman named Sunny and her 55-year-old daughter, Joanna, outside a chicken place in Los Angeles where they were asking for money. Sunny and Joanna were both neurodiverse, trying to get by in a world that has very little patience for difference. Sunny and Jim bonded over jokes. He wrote for television. She used to send gags........

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