Luck in the Art of Losing
As an American, there are few things that you are conditioned to value more than winning. To be the best is essential to the entire concept of American exceptionalism, and it starts very young. Babies elbowing babies in little tiny baby races and the like. There may have been a point in America’s history where the scarcity of resources justified this hyper-competitiveness, but surely that time has long since passed. After all, we’re told it’s the greatest nation on earth. The greatest nation the world has EVER known. It’s unfair, really, to make such broad claims. I mean, we don’t know what dinosaur civics looked like.
In many ways, I was driven as a young person to fully invest in this mindset. I wanted to be the best in every class at school. I wanted to win every audition. No matter the circumstance, if it offered any possibility to be construed as a competition, I wanted to win it. This was, of course, not helped by the sense that nothing I might achieve would ever be good enough for some people, which meant that not only did I feel the need to push myself to win at everything (even, and perhaps especially at unwinnable things), but that anything less than a clear-cut victory or perfection where a scale of quantitative measure existed would be irrationally upsetting to me.
To this day, at the ripe-old-age of too-fucking-old-already, I still can’t bear making mistakes. Or doing things that upset people. Getting something wrong can propel me to Marianas-depths in zero time flat. It makes me worry about losing the people that matter to me, because who could bear to maintain a relationship with someone who occasionally messes up? Though I am working on it, and I am much better than the borderline sociopathic need to win from my younger days, it’s still a struggle.
This week, I lost. Twice. Through no fault of my own, really, but that doesn’t necessarily alter anything about my dysfunctional relationship with success. The first loss, and certainly the more important of the two, wasn’t even a loss that I can really claim. The General Election came and went, and I had no vote. My vote would not have made any difference whatsoever in the outcome. However, as an immigrant, I belong to one of the marginalised groups of people whose futures are a bit darker. I have the benefit of being insulated by many other layers of privilege, so there are people whose safety and wellbeing are much more imperiled than my own, and it is for those people whom I will continue to advocate. But, in every xenophobic comment and every use of ‘migrant’ where ‘person’ would have done just fine, there is a tongue sharpened against me. A laugh where I am collateral damage. I lost without even playing.
The other loss didn’t sting so much. The band of which I am a part was involved in a competition on Saturday. Now, objectively, competitions around art are absurd, and I wasn’t overly invested in winning, because it was an opportunity for us to play together as a band and to share what we do with people. But we lost, which was disappointing. The disappointment didn’t last very long, though, as it was swiftly replaced by better things. Nonsensical conversations in an over-zealously lit McDonald’s after midnight. Laughter to create uncertainty around the direction of travel along a drink’s vessel to digestive tract journey. An unbelievable group of people coming along to show support, and then extending that support in the digital realm afterward.
Being a part of something and sharing it with people who you love, and who you’re pretty sure value you and aren’t secretly plotting to do away with you, is a precious thing. I won’t waste it. And no matter how UnAmerican it makes me, I would swear on a stack of Bibles uphill both ways in the snow whilst barefoot that it’s better than winning could ever hope to be.
