I am not a competitive person. That is not to say I somehow like losing or that I don’t enjoy winning. I just wish there was no such thing as competition whatsoever.
In elementary school, I was the type of kid who didn’t just stand in the corner during dodgeball, waiting for the ball to hit her. I would just deliberately move myself into the line of fire of whomever I thought wouldn’t hit me too hard, but still had good aim, and stay still until it was done. He or she would let out a “WHOOP!” of excitement and high-five somebody–which was fine, because I didn’t care whether or not they thought they had won. I just wanted to be out.
Granted, this gave me a deep-rooted fear of disappointing people, as my fellow 9-year-old teammates tended to turn into assholes as they blamed me and whomever else had been the “reason” they’d lost. All that nonexistent glory that they had been so close to was ruined by us. The shame! So I began “trying,” as I got older (i.e. pulling the same shit, but pretending it was unintentional better). Nevertheless, I would still feel terrible knowing other people were upset with me because they felt shafted due to my incompetence and apathy towards that incompetence.
Competitive people are upsetting to me for a variety of reasons, the first being that they are rarely competitive about rational things. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that some of these irrational things were actually important to having a “good future,” whatever that is, but because of a competitive best friend and a whole lot of underachieving on my part, I was clueless to this.
