I am not a competitor. I have never found joy in any sort of contest, be it physical or intellectual. If a teacher hosted a spelling bee I would rather share the spoils of victory with my classmates than have them view me as the "winner." And God forbid I'd lose and sulk in the shadows of another's glory. I do not compete for I cannot stand the isolation of winning nor the tragedy of losing.
Any psychologist would revel in the fact of my fear of competing. "It's because you're a twin!" Yes, you win, you mind archaeologists, you diggers of brain matter. My sister and I must have been the best of friends while swimming about our mother's belly because from infancy on we made an unspoken pact: we will not compete.
Swimming is where it started and also where it continued. My father, a state champion swimmer, wanted us to join a swim team. We took swim classes, mastered the breaststroke, failed miserably at freestyle, and ran back into our mother's arms: "Please don't let Daddy make us compete!" Except the word probably wasn't compete; our fear was most likely voiced in a precociously mastered fragment "swim fast against other people who could beat us and kill our inner spirits."
Alas, we never came close to joining a swim team.
While pursuits in the physical realm took a backseat, our prowess in elementary education evolved. We were smart kids. We were in special programs and we took special field trips. There was a small group of short and skinny smart kids and we banded together, loving when we all received big juicy red apple A+s on the top right corners of our tests. Competition did not exist, for we were all equally better and smarter than the kids who were not as good and smart as us. For most of my childhood I covered myself up in the safety of a group security blanket.
And then things picked up and kicked up and moved as quickly as this description of my late youth will be. My sister and I started bursting and blooming and seeing ourselves as parts of a whole, rather than a whole meshed-up smushed together being. We held hands and promised never to "break up;" at the same time we twisted around and jumped over and ducked under our arms, forming a pretzel that stretched out between boys and debate tournaments and then stretched back into the safety of our bedroom. We competed and we hated it.
I've had brief forays into competition. I liked being faster than everyone on my field hockey team and being more eloquent than kids I debated against. But I've grown up and grown out of "competing." I don't care about getting better grades than everyone; rather, I like just passing my classes. This isn't to say that I am above caring about other people's successes. As Gore Vidal says: "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." This comfortable and quiet malaise of equality feels safer than the loud and disruptive positions denoted by the words "winner" and "loser."
And yet, I will compete. As passive as I wish I were and could always be, as much as I would like to avoid confrontation, there's an evil seed planted deep inside of me that is ever-growing: self-righteousness. I know it is there because my sister tells me that she senses it in herself as well. Oh, how we have evolved! While avoiding confrontation throughout our childhood we have created our own special school of competition: We are right and we will always be more right than you for we are two and you are one.
Ask any boyfriend current or past and he'll attest to the Hardaway one-two punch. I am one and she is two and you will be punched because you never stood a chance. I used to avoid competition because I always knew that, one day, it would pit me against my sister. So we were pitted against one another and we both came out on top. We are both winners and losers and together we'll win or lose against you. We've saved ourselves from extremities: The edge is taken off the winning for we share it. The losing is cushioned by the other's words: "We didn't need them anyway."
One day I'll have to compete on my own. One day I'll have to fight for someone I love without the help of my sister. One day I may even have to fight someone for her love. I cannot stand the isolation of winning nor the tragedy of losing. Isolation is a foreign concept; losing is rough on my fragile emotional composition. But I can handle both, as long as when I unwind myself, undo the pretzel, stand upright and hold out my hand, I am not alone.
Connolly's column runs weekly Thursdays. She can be reached at c.hardaway@cavalierdaily.com.
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