She had been competing since she was twelve. Grades first. Then college admissions. Then performance reviews. Then her peer group’s career trajectories mapped against her own without her fully admitting she was doing it.
At forty-one she decided to stop. She was tired of measuring. She was tired of feeling like she was behind something she had never agreed to race.
Six months in, she felt better. She also felt, underneath the better, a quiet unmooring. Like she had taken down the scaffolding and wasn’t sure what the building looked like without it.
For people who have been competing their whole lives, the thing they’re competing in often functions as an identity. Not just a behavior. When you remove the comparison, you remove the structure that has been telling you who you are. The relief is real. So is the disorientation. Both arrive together, and the disorientation is rarely discussed.
I’ve tried to stop comparing. I’ve found it easier to decide than to actually do. The internal ranking continues after the decision. What changes is your relationship to it. You start to notice it as a habit rather than a truth.
She stopped competing. She felt better. She also felt unmoored and wasn’t sure where she was without a finish line to orient herself by.
That disorientation is the work. Not a failure. The work.
What was she actually running from, and what happens now that she’s stopped?
The quiet after competition isn’t emptiness. It’s space. What goes in it takes time to discover. For people who’ve been racing since adolescence, learning to inhabit space rather than fill it is its own kind of work.
She’s six months in. She’s not sure she’s any closer to knowing what she actually wants. But she’s asking the question for the first time without a leaderboard in her peripheral vision.
That’s something.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Is there something you measure yourself against that you haven’t fully chosen to care about?
- What would you be, or want, if you weren’t comparing yourself to anyone?
- What happens to your sense of self when you remove the things you’ve been measuring it by?
You might also find yourself in He Spent Twenty Years Building Something He Wasn’t Sure He Wanted Anymore..
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.