LAMORINDA WEEKLY | On competition


Alexandra Reinecke is from Westchester, New York. She currently resides in Lafayette, where she is junior at Campolindo High school. She writes every morning at 5 o'clock opposite a print of "View of the World from 9th Avenue" and consumes copious amounts of coffee. Her likes include maple-flavored anything and snow. Her favorite animal is a tiger.

The research I did at Columbia this summer was about Hinduism. There was a lot of talk about ego, and after four years spent presenting not Alexandra, the person, but Alexandra, the product, it hit a little too close to home. In J. D. Salinger's "Franny and Zooey," the protagonist comments that she's not afraid of not competing. She's afraid she will compete.

I was raised to believe in excellence. My mother, even as a lawyer out of practice, argues mostly with logic, and after truth. My father studied his way out of the kind of poverty that, the more I consider it, appears to me like a bonfire boyhood, one of those burning tepees not only liable, but engineered to fall in on itself.

But somewhere between now and learning from there, somewhere between wanting excellence and crying here, tucked beneath a heap of blankets and heaving like a patient on a perfectly beautiful night, I lost sight of what excellence meant, or what it was supposed to mean. I clung to the trophy. I kept my eyes on the prize. I ignored the strain the perpetual striving, like a sustained jog might wreak on the lungs, wreaked on my mind.

I don't know when doing my best turned into feeling entitled to a 4.0. I don't know when wanting an education turned into three black sweatshirts with the name of a college arched obnoxiously across the chest. All these things happened gradually, I guess. Fell away from me. Tennis lessons. Television. The curiosity which made me a child fascinated by sushi rice, by the mechanics of hinges in doors.

But I've become less these few years, inside, growing my resume and earning my report cards for the fridge. I've deteriorated from the inside. Become hollow.

Today my little cousin showed me his soccer participation trophy and I think I'm a little like that. That slim, gold little man, posed mid-kick. Gilded but empty. Admired from afar, and treated fragilely by those who know well enough that granite pedestal, imprinted words, golden shell do not a hero make.

I miss looking up to my mother, instead of wanting her to look up to me. I miss my father, who is more of a person sitting in his plaid pajamas, meditating on the floor of his basement office than I am commanding a room with my wit and a microphone.

I miss myself before I began competing. I miss being who I was before I became terrified by the wrong thing. I'm tired, not just of the Hinduism books, or the endnotes, but of the chase.

I wanted to come home, not just to California, but to myself. I want to warn my little cousin against the dangers of exhaustion, against the dangers of setting his soccer trophy on the shelf, where it can become conceited, where it won't be content with excellence, but live in constant peril of a fall from great height.