Breaking Up With Competition (An Ongoing Process)

A shift in perspective, an opening of doors.

Growing up the youngest of three older brothers, it’s hardly a surprise that competitiveness dug itself deep within my psyche. Childhood was studded with daily battles: inhaling a bowl of Lucky Charms before it met a swift death by way of three hungry boys, vying for time on the family computer to nurture my Sims addiction, and sprinting my ass off to my room to lock the door behind me after I instigated a fight.

In high school, I had a field hockey obsession and a perfectionist attitude toward academics, but maintained a people-pleasing demeanor. I was never a bully, or outwardly brash; my competitiveness thrived internally, parasitically, deep inside me.

Along came 2019, the year I decided to take my burgeoning sign painting hobby seriously and enroll in the Sign Graphics program at Los Angeles Trade–Technical College (LATTC). My competitive shadow was right there with me, trailing by my side while I ran on the fumes of a bad break-up and the desire to prove everyone wrong. I wanted to be the best and I wanted to be perfect. Yeah, I can just switch it all up and throw myself into sign painting, I said to my imagined enemy, who was really just myself. You’ll see, just you wait, I’ll show you. Watch and find out. 

Classes were four days a week, starting at 7am and ending just after noon. Never getting to bed early enough, I was chronically exhausted, manically inspired, and never satisfied. And then there was the pandemic, reducing me—along with many others, I’m sure—to a chaotic blur of highs and lows.

The art I produced during this time often revealed this inner turmoil, totally unconscious to me, with themes of all-or-nothing mentality, ego, desire, and nihilism. Whenever another sign painter scored an interesting job or painted something I wished I did, I couldn’t separate myself from it. Their win was my loss, and so began another game, an invisible competition.

The unraveling of this exhausting mindset began about two years ago while thumbing through Grace Bonney’s book, In the Company of Women. One of the interviews was with Christine Schmidt, artist and owner of Yellow Owl Workshop, who cites the following as a trait she is most proud of: "I don't compare myself to others. I'm not in a competition."

It floored me, so blunt and obvious and final. I tried it on for size, working the words around my mouth. I don’t compare myself to others. I’m not in a competition. I, am not, in a competition. It soon became a mantra, something to repeat when intrusive thoughts bubbled up, and eventually I started to believe it.

Being competitive goes hand-in-hand with being hard on yourself, the belief being that if you’re not beating yourself up, you will slip into a pool of laziness and abject failure. However, the opposite is true; when we opt for self-compassion, we tap into our mammalian care-giving system, making us feel safe and able to thrive. 

I’ve worked to redirect my angst toward themes of zeitgeist, of collective ideas, of minding my business, of being happy for others, of exercising gratitude, of being gracious. Like a discerning patron of a buffet, I’ve picked the aspects of competitiveness I want to keep—determination, resilience, motivation, initiative, diligence—and leave behind the rest.

The concept of collective ideas is highlighted in The Creative Act by Rick Rubin; it’s the belief that ideas come from our shared human consciousness, and it is up to the artist to channel them into the world. (If you’d like to go down a rabbit hole, check out the ‘multiple discovery’ hypothesis, which supports this idea.)

If I don’t pick up the phone when a new idea calls, I often find that another artist will. In those moments, I can only smile, knowing that the idea was once a shared spark in the cloud of our minds. Not all is lost, because I always retain my own interpretation of a new concept, and I’ll have more ideas. There is no shortage.

This shift in attitude abandons scarcity mentality and instead shifts the focus on acting upon and completing projects, allowing me to savor the lifelong journey of being an artist. 

Despite all this woo-woo anti-competitive self work, this is certainly not to say that sports, the ultimate realm of competition, are Bad and Wrong and Not Good For Us. I actually think the opposite, that they are the safest space for competitiveness. I love watching and playing sports; I still have my field hockey sticks, and I’ll play basketball, tennis, or golf with anyone who will tolerate my occasional expletive-laced outbursts (usually my boyfriend, bless his soul). 

Sports take the negative byproducts of competitiveness—anger, fear, anxiety—and turn them belly up, forcing you to regulate your emotions. Anger? Sure, play angry and see what happens and how you perform. Fear? Sports are a public act, not a private one, so being vulnerable is inherent to the game. Anxiety? Worse-case scenario you lose, so what? The greatest athletes have all lost, and they learned how to do it with grace. It’s just part of the game.

Until next time,
Jenna