SECOND PLACE
EPISODE 019: SECOND PLACE
In the 7th grade I won 2nd place in a contest in which I was the only entrant. To say it scarred me for life is an overstatement but it made me profoundly suspicious of the toxic instinct to compete and compare, most especially in creative efforts. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Very few people know that I am an award-winning cartoonist. I wish I could say it’s modesty that keeps me from broadcasting that but the truth is a little more awkward. When I was in the seventh grade I had high aspirations of being a professional artist, an ambition that seemed fully-endorsed by the universe when it was announced that my school would be holding a cartoon-drawing competition. The day the competition was announced I started my drawing and began writing my acceptance speech. My subject was a music teacher that I liked, a large woman named Mrs. Black with notable features and an infectious smile. As I drew her over and over again during the week that followed I liked to imagine how flattered she would feel when my caricature of her won the competition. In hindsight I suppose the things that make a good caricature may not be the things we most want to see lampooned by a 13-year old. I came to that knowledge the hard way. But this is not about Mrs.Black. This is about the insatiable need to compete and compare. I’m David duChemin and this is episode 019 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
There’s no easy way to put this so I’ll just say it: I won second place in that competition, not the award I’d been hoping for but it would have been some consolation had it not been quickly revealed that I was the only kid who had entered. My cartoon was, apparently, so bad that it was beat out by every person that hadn’t bothered to draw one. It was probably that moment that the idea of competition soured for me and I realized the game was rigged. I don’t know who gives a kid second place when he’s the only one that showed up for the gig, but I hope they got pink eye. I laugh about it now, but it was deflating to me as a kid who was trying so hard just to be himself and find something he was good at. I guess I what I really wanted wasn’t just to be good, but to be better-than, and that’s always a dangerous aspiration in something as personal as our creative work.
The urge to compete seems to be built into humanity, and if not to compete, then at least to compare. We spend a lot of time looking around. We use other people as our points of reference. Humans seem to find it very hard, to quote singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn, “to love ourselves without thinking someone else holds a lower card.” It’s built-in, a leftover from a time when our place in the tribe was much more a matter of survival than it is now. It’s lizard-brain stuff and when the zombie-pocalypse finally comes I’m sure it’ll help some of us survive. but for right now, that competitive or comparative instinct can prevent us from thriving, being ourselves, and making our best work.
American poet, ee cummings, had this to say: “to be nobody but yourself–in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else–means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” Forget the zombies, our hardest battle is to maintain our individuality when the forces around us, and within us, seem hell-bent on pushing us into a mould. And when we look at others to see how well we fit, we’re not comparing apples to apples, but something more like apples to elephants: any comparison between the two is meaningless. We know it, but still we persist, comparing our insides to the carefully polished, well-curated outsides of others.
I don’t know, maybe we’re just looking for clues, searching for signs that show us we're on the right track. But they don’t. They only show us where we are in relation to someone else’s path. Their progress down that road, and the apparent direction of that road, have nothing to tell us about our own. For all we know they’re backtracking, trying to find their way back to the last place things made sense. Or maybe they’re walking in circles. Maybe they’re miserable. Their inner journey can’t be mapped with external vectors, and neither can ours.
And we know this. And we get told not to compare ourselves to others but that “the only person you should compare yourself to is yourself.” And It sounds wise, and we nod our heads and think, “yes, that’s very insightful, I’ll start doing that instead." Unless you’re the kind of guy who wins second place when competing against himself, in which case it’s not helpful at all. In fact I think it too is probably toxic, because we don’t see ourselves any more objectively than we see others. We see failure and fear and secrets held too tight for too long. We see the ghosts of the past and the hopes of the future, but do many of us really ever see ourselves as we are?
Probably not. Not only is the mirror all warped like those at a carnival funhouse, but perception depends on what we’re looking for, and on how we see, and I’d argue that most of us are so complex that we’re all looking not only at a funhouse mirror but doing so through a kaleidoscope. What we see there is so jumbled and complex that it’s no wonder we revert to the simpler comparisons of us versus them.
So what then? Don’t compare. Not with others and not with yourself. Don’t look for similarities, don’t look for differences. Don't size yourself up, don’t allow yourself to feel better or worse based on where you are, where you’ve been or where others are or are not. Why must we know which rung of the ladder we sit upon? What good does it do us? More importantly, what harm does it set us up for? If you’re me, plenty.
Here’s another story. When I was a kid I was riding my bike, though, for reasons that I can only now guess at, I was doing so while looking over my shoulder. Suddenly I was lying on the ground with a splitting headache looking up at car. I couldn’t believe it: I had been hit by a car. But when I stood up and shook it off, the car was parked. No driver in sight, just a big head-shaped dent in the back from the kid who rode his bike into it.
In hindsight it seems obvious that I shouldn’t have been looking over my shoulder. But if I’d been looking at myself in a mirror I still would have hit the car. In this dodgy metaphor the former is what happens when we compare ourselves to others, the latter is what happens when we compare ourselves to the image we see of ourselves. Neither should be mistaken for looking forward.
So where do we look? What’s “forward” in this analogy? I’m going to suggest that we look to our work, and find meaning in that. Yes, learn from others, but keep your eyes on your work. Don’t worry about what others are doing or thinking. Don’t concern yourself about their progress at all. One of the ways we can do this is to keep the tension between consumption and creation tilted heavily in favour of making. If we’re spending more time on social media, or reading, or looking at the work of others, than we are on our own work, there’s a good chance things are pulling in the wrong direction, that we’re listening to too many voices and they will drown out the most important one: yours. Which of course is why some people spend so much time consuming, because the alternative - mud-wrestling the muse and getting our work done, can be hard. We call this time looking at what everyone else is doing, “ inspiration" or “ research", but I wonder if it’s not often just procrastination, a distraction from the one thing that will be sure to improve our work and get it moving in the right direction and that’s doing our work.
Don’t worry about whether you’re getting better or doing it right. Don’t worry how it measures up, because it doesn’t. There is no measure. It’s either work you love, work that resonates, work that matters to you, and perhaps, eventually, to others. But it doesn’t succeed or fail because it is like, or unlike, some other thing. You do not become a better artist or craftsman or how however you see yourself, by being more like, or different from, anyone else. Do your work. Let it challenge you, get it done, trust your gut and celebrate the small wins.
You’re not the only one looking over their shoulders from time to time, hoping to catch a glimpse of yourself in someone else. Or to find some clarity in the differences. But it might help to remember that the goal, at least for most of us, I think, is not to become like another person or do work that is better than theirs, nor is to be different from them. It’s not about them at all. It’s about you and your work, and as you make your art, it will make you and get you closer to the person you are becoming. No mold. No template. Just you. That’s how it works. Art, and life, is not about winning, it’s about making and becoming, and the meaning we find there. Compared to that, well, nothing compares.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0