Silver medal.
My struggle with second place
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I’ve been fortunate enough to win a few medals in my lifetime. The majority of them were presented to me in high school, and all of those for my marks. My school held an annual award ceremony, congratulating the top students in each subject across all five grades. As far as I can remember, a few personalised certificates were given out, but the overall procedure was quite familiar: the three students with the highest grade average for a particular subject for the duration year were called to the stage and awarded gold, silver and bronze medals respectively. I believe that my collection of half a dozen or so medals is mostly bronze, with one or two silvers, and a fluke gold that was presented to me for attaining the highest average grade in my year, across all of my subjects. Side note: The title was rather short-lived, I’m afraid—the next year I was enrolled into advanced mathematics classes where I went on to score an average in the mid-fifties. There is another medal of mine that hangs amidst the rest, it’s a participation medal I was given at a karate tournament I attended when I was five. Not counting this, the highest commendation I ever received outside of academics was the occasional ‘most improved’ certificate for the various mandatory school sports I participated in, of which I was very dubious. Did it suggest that I struggled to play hockey at the beginning of the season, but ended the season showing impressive skill? Or did it suggest that although I ended the season playing quite poorly, I seemed at the beginning of the season to be beyond all hope? Aside from the raised eyebrow that accompanied these certificates, my heart was usually full of pride when my efforts were recognised in the form of a medal. Bar silver. Silver, I often felt in my teenage years, only served as a reminder of my near miss at achieving gold.
My parents and I often played board and card games when I was a kid. Games served two functions: namely, entertaining me; but my parents also used board games as an opportunity to teach me how to lose—or, indeed, how to win—with grace. They were careful to teach their only child to win with humility and lose without malice, this being a difficulty that many only children seem to struggle with, some into adulthood. As a result, the games we play today usually unfold rather politely, with a quick congratulations to the winner before starting the next round. We play to pass the time, not really to win. My girlfriend’s family plays games a little differently. Their family of five plays rougher than mine does; Settlers of Catan, I have discovered, is more fun when it includes smack-talk. While I’ve learned to adjust my timid play style, they also do something else which I find much more difficult to adapt to: they play for second place. I can’t understand it at all. To me, games are almost always far more dichotomous than my award ceremonies in high school were. There is no silver medal in Catan; there is only the winner and the rest. A silver medal, I remember hearing from a friend in school, is the prize for the first loser. I tried not to take those words to heart, coming in second place can be a wonderful honour. However, as I feel with Settlers of Catan and Uno and Rummikub, second place can sometimes be as good as last.
I occasionally feel like I come in second place in my relationships. The feeling usually stirs with something small: a phone call that ends up being shorter than I expected, a message I sent that wasn’t responded to, a detail of my life incorrectly remembered. What I tend to do next is lock myself away in my emotions. If I feel unimportant because a phone call with my parents doesn’t go as I expected or if it ends before I imagined it would, when my girlfriend calls me later, I’ll keep her talking on the phone until I have to hang up. I’ll bombard her with enough questions about her and her day to fill the whole phone call. That way I can tell myself, once I’ve hung up, that my feelings are right: I am unimportant, we didn’t talk about me at all. This false positive is usually followed by a social retreat, I’m quieter or less upbeat. No one sees me, I tell myself, and the longer it takes someone I love to spontaneously notice my lack of engagement, the more I prove to myself how worthy of second place I truly am. Maybe they’ll notice me once they have enough time…
Some days I’m not my dad’s priority, or my girlfriend’s, or my best friend’s. That’s a natural and digestible part of my relationships. I rarely feel like I come in second place when I can see that my dad has something or someone important to attend to. My feeling of being left with the silver medal often arises when an unspoken need or expectation of mine isn’t met. If I miss my dad and I tell him I need to spend time with him by sending him an email with a link to a great article I read (this is a real thing my dad and I do), but he doesn’t respond in the way I expect, it hurts me. That’s when I begin to feel like I’m not a priority, like I come in second place. I believe that I’ve communicated what I need—time with my dad—in a clear way, but my dad hasn’t interpreted my hidden message. To him, it was just an email and a cool article. When he responds to my email instead of my need, I tell myself that he doesn’t consider my feelings or perhaps that I am fundamentally misunderstood. In actuality, I haven’t communicated very well. I love my dad. I trust him. Telling him, or any loved one, what I need is still a really tough thing to get right—especially when it comes to sensitive or intimate subjects. To communicate in a way that doesn’t leave me hurt, I first have to possess the emotional intelligence to recognise that I feel lonely, and then I have to have the bravery to communicate my need to my loved ones. More difficult than it sounds.
The silver medals that hang in my parents’s home were given to me. The silver medals that hang heavy in my heart are self-bestowed. I’m often the one deciding that my loved ones have put me in second place; very seldom (if ever) do they communicate to me that I am not a priority, not considered, not seen. Perhaps, then, I also have the freedom to walk away from the podium entirely. Trying to discern whether my loved ones truly value me or testing whether they can read my emotional status without telling them anything steals a lot of energy away from what I’m actually looking for: feeling like I belong to the people I love.
The email chain I share with my dad is great: article-laden and full of love. I highly recommend emailing interesting things to your loved ones. If you enjoyed this journal, please send it to someone you love.