Flashback Friday: You Can Do Better Than That [Narrated]

Flashback Friday began as a way to revisit older work—not to tidy up the past, but to reexamine the stories that shaped me. Some essays ask to be reworked. Others ask to be re-seen.

Thirteen years ago, I wrote Life in a Northern Town. It was part family history, part personal reckoning—a tribute to the grit and pain woven into the coal-stained fabric of my lineage. I was tracing the path from miners to university graduates, from inherited limitation to opportunity seized. What I didn’t fully see back then was how much of that path I was still walking in someone else’s shoes.

The essay ended at a turning point—the moment I spoke a dream aloud and was mocked for it. What followed was bullying, disillusionment, and silence. But what followed in life was far more complex.

This week’s piece, You Can Do Better Than That, picks up not just the thread of aspiration, but the cost of it—the way ambition, especially when entangled with family legacy, can warp into something heavier: performance, perfectionism, pressure. It’s about what we inherit without consent, and what it takes to finally choose our own way.

Back then, I thought I was telling a story about escape.
Now, I see I was also chronicling the blueprint for how not to belong.
This is the second story.
The one that took me a while to claim.

And this time, I’m not asking for permission.

You Can Do Better Than That

I never set out to build a life of borrowed dreams.
But looking back, I can see the shape of it.

As the youngest of three boys, I was expected to follow the family pattern—same school, same Physics degree, same unspoken hopes that belonged more to my parents than to me. They were both bright but denied opportunity. Their deferred dreams slipped into our bones.

I remember being about eight or nine, watching my brother John prepare to follow David to university. I don’t know what prompted it—maybe a question, maybe my own quiet declaration—but I told my mum I wanted to be a teacher.
She shut it down instantly.
“You can do better than that.”

It confused me. My headteacher, Mr. Wright, was a hero to me—sometimes gruff, always kind, magnetic. But my mother didn’t see it that way. Her comment didn’t come from cruelty. It came from the ache of unrealized potential. I carried that ache, too—though I didn’t know it then.

So I overrode my inner compass.
I learned how to nod, how to perform.
And I did it again and again.

It wasn’t until 2009—after the financial meltdown—that I chose a hard yes. The startup I’d poured myself into collapsed, taking half a million dollars of my money with it. I was offered another chance to run a similar tech firm, got to the final two for a Fortune 500 CIO role. And then I remembered a different calling. A quieter one.

Helping kids be all they can be.
Helping kids like me.

That’s how I entered the nonprofit world—stepping into rooms I never thought I’d occupy. Working with mayors, governors, senators, meeting Presidents. The founder of the organization—a descendant of a robber baron—had grown up with access and entitlement. I hadn’t. He taught me the power of a big idea. I taught him how to execute.

I believed in the mission.
I believed in myself.
And for a while, I belonged.

When I came across financial activity that raised red flags, I brought it to the auditor’s attention. Just days after being praised for my performance, I was let go. The official reason didn’t hold up under scrutiny. I later learned that documentation had been revised after the event. The Board chose not to pursue it.

I’ve never regretted speaking up. I acted with integrity. And even though it cost me, it brought something clearer into view: the realization that I would no longer compromise my values to protect someone else’s power or comfort.

In the years that followed, I stepped into more behind-the-scenes roles—strategy, grantwriting, quiet mentorship. I kept doing work I was proud of. But I also saw behind the curtain. Too many so-called leaders—ethical in public, hollow in private.
I stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt.
I stopped giving them my silence.

Instead, I learned to trust myself again.

My big ideas would often got funded—but once the spotlight shifted, they’d be mismanaged or abandoned by those chasing the next ego-stroke. I no longer felt the need to stay and fix what others broke. I learned when to say no.
I began to police my boundaries.

That shift didn’t come easily.
It came from letting go of something I’d carried far too long.

For decades, I’d harbored resentment toward my mother—her emotional distance, her long illness, her early death. I never got to be the child who was nurtured without having to earn it.
I became a shape-shifter, a pleaser.
It was exhausting, remembering who I was supposed to be in each room.

Only when I made peace with her humanity—understood her fear, her silence, the traumas she never spoke of—could I stop accepting crumbs in relationships. That forgiveness didn’t feel like release.
It felt like returning to the child I hadn’t allowed myself to grieve.
And it allowed me to rewrite the story of who I am.

I said yes by not saying no, over and over again.
Now, every yes is deliberate. Every no is mine to give.

When my own daughter stood at a similar crossroads—fresh from Cambridge, considering a government job or becoming a teacher—I heard my mother’s words leave my own mouth.
“You can do better than that,” I said.
There was a pause.
Then the hurt in her voice, across the Atlantic.
A long-distance ache I still feel in my chest.
I apologized instantly. She forgave me. But I haven’t forgotten.

That was the last time I let inherited judgment speak for me.

These days, I no longer search for rooms that make me feel seen.
I create from a place where I already am.

Not to prove.
Not to please.
Just to belong—to myself.