My Competition; Myself

I am competitive.

I want to win.
No question.
I want to be the best
..and I want recognition of the fact that I am the best.

But here is a shocker.

I'm not the best.

Don't laugh, but this has been a huge and difficult lesson for me. I think a lot of people in my generation grew up with parents trying to give them constant positive re-enforcement. This is great in many ways. I certainly think it is better than degrading your child. However, it has given me a bit of a complex. I constantly desire other people's praise, I want to hear how good I'm doing, and too often that dictates the things I do and the way I act. Too often that is my only motivation.

It is difficult for me to admit, but for the longest time the only reason I sang is to get other people's praise. It made me hate singing. It made me quit singing. I couldn't tell if I actually liked singing, the only thing I KNEW that I liked was the praise I received from my family/friends. And when I got to college that praise was extremely rare, and was more often criticism. I wasn't prepared for it. I wanted to be better than everyone, but everyone was better than me. So you know what I did?

I quit.

I dropped out of college and for about 5 years my mind drifted. I had no direction. The only direction I had ever understood was the quest for praise and affirmation. I thought I was a failure, because no one was patting me on my back. But I got tired of crying about how my life didn't mean anything, and my mind started to change...

When I did the MS150 (bike ride from Houston to Austin) earlier this year it was one of the first times I ever did anything that I loved, that I enjoyed, and that I wasn't good at. I'm not saying I'm an awful cyclist. I can push myself up a hill like no ones business, and that makes me feel great. But I am slow, really slow. And that is okay.

You know what I would have done if I would have compared myself to more than 90% of the other cyclists on the road during the MS150? I would have quit. They were better than me. They were faster, they were better equipped; some had trained harder, some had teams supporting them.

I did it alone, I went slow, I came in near the end....and I loved it, and I didn't quit...and I finished.

I was inspired to write this by a friend of mine who is doing a 5K with her brother this weekend. My friend is, in my opinion, athletic and amazing. I aspire to what she can do and the speed she can run. But she is worried, because her brother is faster than her. He started running just a month or so ago and can already easily beat her times. Basically, he is better than her (for now).

She is competitive too. I know it is frustrating to her, because she has been training, she has been pushing. But I know she will never stop.

"Just do your best," is what I tell her as encouragement.

And for the first time I'm saying that, not because it is the 'nice' thing to say, but because I mean it. I'm not perfect. I still want to quit, I'm sure I will still quit sometimes because I'm so crushed by the fact that I am not the best. But, I'm learning. The best experiences are when I aspire to be as fast as my brother-in-law who averages 25mph on his bike, when I aspire to run as fast as my friend Helen, when I aspire to be as dedicated and inspiring as my friend Candice...but I compete and aim to beat myself. When I am on that hill and my body is crying out to stop, when my mind keeps saying I could just get off and walk that hill, when my stomach says 'eat that ice cream, exercise tomorrow'. When I say no, when I keep going, when I push...I win every time. I am the best of me, every time.

I aspire to be like the best and I do my best.
And when I do that I don't need praise or anyone's affirmation.
Because when that happens I am proud of myself, I am happy, I am alive.

And that is victory.