COMPETITION

I started working on a new "thing" ( I don't yet know what it is) today, something that captured my imagination enough so that I put pen to paper. It;s no coincidence that it came after I read a few Amazon samples of books that have gotten raves, all by women. I was surprised at how ordinary the writing is. It could be the plots are ingenious, unpredictable, but the sample was only about twenty pages so I can't say for sure. I found myself thinking, well, I could do as well, and a few minutes after reading the last sample, I got an idea, a good one, and I actually wrote a scene.
     I never thought of myself as competitive. I never tried hard enough and that was one of my problems. I couldn't put  myself in the game. I didn't want to go head to head with anybody; I was certain I would lose. I didn't know this was at the heart of so many problems in me. I kept it hidden from myself because I was too afraid to let my real feelings out - the ones that were all about desperately wanting to win and the certainty that I never would. 
     But in fact I was very competitive. I cut winners "down to size". I found ways to discount and criticize their efforts - well, I convinced myself, I certainly wouldn't want that. My competitiveness was so repressed I didn't even know it was there.
     There's a very dark side to all this. It's the source of the constant comparison I was making between me and everyone else. It's a form of envy - see, that person has more than I do, has accomplished more; why do I always get the short end of the stick. 
     I wish I could trace exactly how I was brought out of that terrible dynamic. I know I began to make progress when I realized that constant comparing was a kind of self-pity. They have so much and I have so little. I saw how sorry  I was for myself.  I began to inch up to some of my fear that if I competed I was bound to lose. To finally recognize something so deep seated and self-destructive is to be already moving toward change. I began to be able to feel my strengths, to look at them and not at anybody else. I didn't know it but I was leaving the crippling kind of competitiveness behind. The more I valued myself the less I looked at and compared myself to anyone else. I began to get free enough to focus on my own work, and do my best work.
     But the ground beneath all of this has to be seeded. With the willingness to move forward, even when I'm terrified - in other words, to have faith that wherever I'm led will be the place I want to go. A willingness to surrender what I think of as my best ideas and opinions, especially about myself. A willingness to not run from deep and frightening emotion. A willingness to surrender everything.
     There is so much more that has gone into the changes I feel in myself. I know I can't trace the path exactly because no one thing sums it up. There are so many levels in each of us, so many aspects of our experience and values, so many chains and braids, merging and untangling. Our inner lives are an endlessly evolving collaboration.