Last week, I bolted awake at 3 a.m. (most likely due to lingering jet lag) with a lot of thoughts about competing. As with most of my “thoughts,” I found it instantly fertile ground as a writing prompt. That morning over coffee and #morningpages I brain-dumped everything on my heart at present involving competition.
It was long and heavy.
At fifty-three years of age, I find myself done with competing. It is as if I was born with a finite number of competitive genes, and I burned them out like a meteor air burst and now I cannot muster the teeniest urge of it back.
Poof! It’s gone.
I thought about watching others compete for love and time. I thought about years and YEARS of competing professionally. I thought about my exploits in competing for someone’s love and attention.
I thought about the things in front of me - professional, and personal, and how I have absolutely zero desire to do what is “necessary” to win.
I then thought about my great nephew and the fact that I will most likely not have the time with him as he grows up that I had with his father. My first thought was, I have raised five kids in my life. I’m good. Is that awful? Maybe. Also, to be fair, with three of those I operated more as a third parent, but the point is still there that I have invested in the raising of others. I made choices where their needs were above my own. I think that was the point my heart and head were debating, wrestling over. Is it okay to put my needs above the next generation’s? To choose a life that means not being present in their lives as I committed to their parents and their parents. Maybe the biggest irony of this is that I am “single, never been married, no children adult.” Maybe the heartbreak is that as a child I never imagined a life without a husband, children, or a family of my own. I am grateful for the ways that God gave me to mother, but it is not the same, and I will not be the one to lie to single women everywhere that it is. I missed out on something, and I have spent the time to grieve it. That said, I also took advantage of every opportunity to love and care for my siblings, my niece and nephews, mentees, etc. I am a giant kid trapped in an adult’s body, and before that, I was an adult trapped in a kid’s body. #IYKYK
I digress.
The truth is competition is a part of life. It can be fun too. Do not kid a kidder, I have had a ball competing throughout my life. I like to win, and more often than not, I have.
The truth is that I have been competing for people’s time, love, approval, attention, recognition, and on and on and on since I was a kid. I have written a lot about how I lived a charmed Norman Rockwell life for the first seven years of my existence. Frankly, it was ridiculous how great it was for a kid like me. From my amazing parents (they were pretty freaking awesome right up until the time they lost their minds) to our farm to the community where we lived to our extended family to the imagination I was born with and given the freedom to explore. It was truly idyllic. I loved large, and I got large love back.
When the bottom fell out, it was like a vacuum. Even now as I write that, I can hear a large sucking noise in my conscious. It was as if all the love I felt, the confidence I had, and all I knew to be true was sucked out of my life in an instant and the world went dark. It sounds dramatic but know that it felt dramatic to a kid of eight. You go from not having to question anything to nothing but questions. What is even real or true anymore?
I do not know if I became a pro at hustling for my worth instantly, but you can be sure it did not take me long. In an instant, I had ZERO security. The father I adored was gone. The mother I adored was locked in her room. The older sister I adored ran away. I can feel eight-year-old me standing in the middle of our living room looking back and forth from the front door my father was served at to the stairs my sister walked down that last time to the hallway that led to my parents’ bedroom where my mother lay. During an EMDR session years ago, that memory came up out of nowhere, and my therapist walked me gently through the entire scene. Of all of the sessions we did together using EMDR, that was the one that shocked me the most. It had not been a conscious memory prior, and to be honest, I have not thought of it again since that day in her office. It shook me to my core. I also believe it was when I was finally able to begin forgiving myself starting with the eight-year-old girl in that room who did not have a fucking clue what had just happened or what to do next, but you know what she did? She took care of herself and her twin brother and sister. She made sure they were all fed. She got them all to school every day. She got them all bathed daily. She even got them all to church walking across a highway to do it. And somewhere along the line when some sort of “new normal” took over and parents started showing back up, that little girl grew up and transferred that hustle of keeping them all alive to hustling for her worth, her future, and she never looked back. She never took a breath. As the kids say today, she never took a beat.
I thought counseling years ago was that ‘beat,’ but the truth is that it was the sabbatical last summer that was the true ‘beat.’ The sabbatical forced me to confront my deeply rooted issues around value, worth, finances, security, and the rhythm and pace of the life I designed to secure and protect those things. The further truth is that the only person I have ever truly competed with is the woman in the mirror. The problem with that is she knew all my strengths and weaknesses; she came to win.
So, I can look at this new epiphany around not wanting to “compete” anymore as super progressive of me and all of that, but the truth is that I am just finally tired of competing against myself.
*Ouch*
I am going to need a moment on that one.
…and a Kleenex.
*Deep Breath*
We all deserve love.
We all deserve to be pursued from time to time.
We all deserve to swoon as a result of someone’s deep love of simply who we are.
We all deserve relationships that make us feel secure.
All of these begin with FIRST having these things within us.
Do I love myself?
Do I pursue my own heart and the things that I love?
Do I swoon over someone?
Do I feel secure in my own skin/life?
In so many ways, it is following the commercial airline safety tip, “Put your air mask on before helping others with theirs.”
I wonder if I have accidentally tripped over another lesson from healing from co-dependency that the truth is when you believe you are doing the right thing in helping others and putting them first, you are only hurting yourself and the people who truly love you. It is insanity running around putting (and keeping) masks on everyone. In a way, it is a competition that you have allowed, and for me, often created for myself.
Here is the damnedest thing of them all, today, I have more love in my heart. I have even more curiosity. More energy. More of me to give to others. Riddle me that.
This leads to my favorite line and certainly my mantra, “The best is yet to come.”
…and it is.
Author’s Note: The original title of this post was “The Art of Competing,” but then as is par for the course in my writing, the more I wrote, the more I processed and discovered what I really thought about competition (today) and the true source of my changing feelings about competing. So, the title changed. The truth is maybe this lesson is not so much ‘overdue’ as it is long in the acknowledging of a few things. If there is one thing I love about me, it is that I never want to stop learning or implementing the resulting lessons. It might be one of my strongest character traits.