a reflection on competition / an exercise in being suffocated as i write

honestly this one is kind of just a getting stuff out of my system, but i have been thinking about the character of competition, when it feels good/constructive and when it feels vindictive. i do believe competition can foster community and indeed promote some of the individual responsibility and sorting your shit out that makes you better at being in community with others. however i also have these insane fucking brainworms about needing to be special and important, and i don't think they're going to go away unless i can face up to that

I feel an anxiety sometimes that my friends and the people around me will eclipse me. When people are doing things that I might do, and sharing it, in ways that I don't, can't, haven't gotten around to, or just haven't done recently, I feel a sense of something like threat.

No cowardice here. I feel threat.

It seems my sense of my own worth is primarily rooted in what feelings I am able to rouse in others, both by doing things for them and their judgements of things I do. Much like a quantum phenomena, my existence happens through the perception of others. Simone de Beauvoir would suggest then that a woman is a quantum being.

Perhaps what's strange is that I don't desire for unspecified others to understand me. No, that's not the feeling I'm looking for. Admiration, a sense of "that's cool", respect of a kind. Being understood is much more terrifying. I never want to be boring. Incompetent is a close second in that race. Somewhere deep within me is a sense that I am competing against those around me, even those I hold dear.

There are some very obvious psychoanalytical roots you could ascribe to this part of me, but suffice to say I have a fraught relationship with individual achievement. A team sport like basketball was a fantastic balm for my psyche. It's an individual competition to get court time, to be important to the outcome of a game, to matter. But you are not valuable in isolation. You develop in response to the people around you to form a better team. The people you compete against for court time, for recognition, are the people who you need to work with to win. The other point guards on my team were my competition, but they were also indispensable to my and our success, as I was to theirs. Nobody can play a full game.

The competition, the drive then, was to be indispensable.

When I was 17 I competed on a regional team representing the south west of England. We were a small team in both senses of the word. Not even starting with a 12 player roster, it could be easy to feel like a pity pick, but for three things.

One: the tournament fined your local association if you didn't play all players within the first half of the game. There was no point taking someone along for the experience alone.

Two: coach cut our tallest player two weeks before the tournament.

Three: at our final training session, he told all of us an honest evaluation of all of us. He did not hold back on people's flaws - that they couldn't keep their head, they lacked composure or game IQ, that they were not decisive enough, lacked sufficient conditioning. I was waiting to be told I was too short to succeed because, well, I was. The evaluation I got was simply: "You work hard. You'll get minutes".

I was floored to not receive any criticism. In retrospect it did not need saying. Of course it didn't. There was nothing I could do to become a better player, beyond what I was already doing: working hard.

I wasn't indispensable to that team. Without me, that team would probably have still finished second. But I was worth playing in the first half; I had a contribution to make.

I bring this up because I am thinking about how I exist in kink and leather, in a world that has titles and competitions but where we are unmoored from any direct connection to that specific tradition of competition. In sports that connection is codified in the rules themselves. In enduring communities there is oral and community lineage. From where I stand, we are picking up history and starting something of our own.

And I am finding that so difficult. My brain froths with the urge to compete against, because if I am not exceptional, or noteworthy, then why would anyone care? And that is the entire antithesis of the point. Competition as an avenue for community is about competing with - it's about doing right by others by improving yourself. Blowouts aren't satisfying to win compared to a game where both teams play well and you still come out on top. You lift up your opponents as much as you try to best them.

And I need to learn to do that without the scaffold of team sports. Because bootblacking is not (yet) a team sport. The container is not one I can continue to take with me to curb the destructive impulses I have to be special and unique and to stand out. Every day it seems I remind myself that I do not have to be noteworthy for my friends to still care about me and think I'm cool.

Who cares if I'm doing things that everyone else is doing? I'm the one doing what I'm doing, and that's enough. My friends like me because I'm me (to the extent that I am me in a stable ongoing sense), not because I am some incredible beacon of new and creative types of perversion the world has never seen before. I don't need to do that to be respected or appreciated.

And yet.

And yet.

It would be a lie to say that I only want to compete for the good reasons. When I extend my senses inwards I find someone who fiercely wants to prove herself, who needs to be the best because that's an expectation so naturalised it never even manifested as direct pressure but merely a foregone conclusion. She craves recognition and she wants to fucking win.

None of this diminishes my desire to build community, to represent what I believe matters, to cultivate vulnerability in myself and others, or to meet the call of a prospective victory that would challenge me to reach out to others more, to take on visibility and responsibility that I have thus far avoided by working more in the background. These desires are still very real. But it would belittle them to pretend that there is not this other impulse inside me, and it's one I find quite ugly.

Can I not be happy for my friends? Can I stop feeling an incessant need to prove myself? Can I not trust that uniqueness and notability are not the only purveyors of my value?

No. I have to dive deeper.

Often feelings like this cache out in a "grace for thee not for me" sort of way. We do not give ourselves the care and patience we give others. But if I am to be brutally honest and to face this thing inside me, this is a belief that runs outwards. I do value uniqueness, notability, and extremity. I do ascribe more mattering to the extraordinary, and I correspondingly dismiss the "mundane", even when it matters a lot to the people involved.

There is a lot to confront in trying to balance the valuing of specific competency against the elitism of society. To separate the worth of some part of someone from their rich whole existence.

Where to go from here. I know that I don't care for these feelings. And I know that I have never experienced an individual victory that made me happy. In school I only ever competed against a spectre of myself. I don't want to keep lying to myself that I am competing with the people around me. Where I am right now, I compete against. My fuel burns with an acrid edge that, so far, I have not been able to let go of.

And I have to ask myself: why am I afraid to lose? so what if someone is better than you? do you really believe that someone showing more engagement in something makes your own lesser?

I do not want to be forgotten and I want to be liked and respected. I want to be extraordinary and that means that when comparison is invited, yes better. Yes, I do, I fear I will be eclipsed and dissolved away.

These are the truths of what my hobbies mean to me right now. They are ugly and I wish they were different. But that's not going to happen if I can't own up to them first.

Who do I want to be then? Let's revisit basketball.

It's an individual competition... to matter. If we are going to survive this, we need to understand that all of us matter.

To get court time. You want court time because you love playing, and because it helps you get better. But if you are better, you will get more court time. The stand feels much the same.

Nobody can play a full game. A thriving ecosystem of perverts and bootblacks is necessary.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot join up the lines all the way. None of this is a sport. And unlike basketball, I am not operating at a disadvantage. I do not need to prove myself to be respected. Potentially losing a title is not a failure. If I lose, I have given someone else the gift of competition, and that is a contribution to community as much as winning is. I suppose that's true in basketball too.

I have written, I have mused, I have put words on digital paper that make me want to sweat and cry and seize up and delete everything.

It's a start. Nobody can play a full game.