Competition

One of the senior privileges at my alma mater was that seniors got to choose a favorite quote that would stand as a personal motto of sorts, listed under their senior photo in the yearbook. One of my best friends listed this as her quote:

"In the end, the only person you're competing with is yourself."

I view myself this way, or rather, that I compete with this version of myself that I think I should be; the version of myself that took risks, that was rougher and meaner around the edges. There's a part of me that wishes I could flirt easily, pick up good looking men, laugh with them, bed them and then leave them quietly sleeping in the morning. I wish my heart was colder, more detached.  I compete with the version of myself that lives independently, even if it were in a dump in east-shit hook, because it seems wussy that I live with my parents now. There's a part of me that wishes I could jump on a bike or a car with nothing but the money in my checking account and take off the way Kerouac did in the forties. The life that I see one particular person living, with all the calamity of a burning fire; and yet, I don't even know if that's in my head, my skewed perception of his life, or if it's an accurate reading on someone I never knew very well. Something I've learned from my father is that the grass isn't always greener on the other side; sometimes, dare I say it, often times, the grass isn't greener. It just looks that way.

I'm only competing with myself because I only have my life to live with. No matter how close you are to a person, you can never know all the difficulties, the worries and anxieties, the ups and downs and the obstacles of someone else's life.  Life is happening now and I choose to put my life in a particular direction every day, the way I put my feet on the hardwood floorboards when I get up in the morning. I really choose the life I want every day, every second of every day; some seconds I'm happy and some seconds I'm not. But I choose the life I want, and I think it's one of which I can be reasonably proud. There's something profound in knowing that I'm only competing with myself and no one else.

The truth is, that I may want to jump on that bike or in that car, but I don't want it enough. Why does that pseudo dream keep rubbing me the wrong way? I don't know. But, I think that's me. Perpetually torn in two different directions.

 I'm only competing with myself, so either way, I'm bound to win.

 For anyone wondering what my senior quote was, here it is:

"And I heard that highway whisper and sigh, are you ready to fly?"---Jackson Browne.

Prophetic, no? Even when I was 17, I knew that road was talking to me in ways I didn't even know.