I stumbled upon this card my high school speech and debate coach gave to me shortly after I bitterly lost a big speech competition my senior year:
"I too believe in you! I believe in your wit, amazing talents, and your SINCERITY! You're an awesome writer, speaker, and leader. I'm at a loss for what to do without you."
And while I do enjoy basking in compliments, I'll explain the context in which it was crucially amazing that my coach recognized that she needed to bathe me with reminders of my brilliance. Short version: I lost when everyone thought I should have won, and the other competitor's coach rubbed it in like a bad sport.
Thorough version: It was some club speech competition-- Rotary, Lions, similar-- and the topic was something inane and boring like "Democracy: Is it Right for Everyone?" which is obviously a loaded question but whatever. Anyway, I understood it was a conservative audience in a liberal town, and that a unique answer would use conservative rhetoric and language to describe the liberal and objective analysis to the topic. I don't remember what I said specifically, but I made a point of believing every word; believing with every fiber in my body that my answer was so thought-out and so irrespective of party lines, so correct, that there was no way everyone else's cookie-cutter, "yes, Democracy is great" speeches could have won.
And yet, they did.
The winning speaker's coach, a woman that my coach later told me she loathes, issues an informal thank-you speech standing at her table as everybody is mingling to leave: "I'd just like to thank everyone for coming, and especially to the judges, who believe in the sincerity of a the speaker's content rather than the perfect presentation." She is looking directly at me and my coach as she says this, and I am appalled that this woman has the gall to insult a seventeen year old girl who spent weeks writing and memorizing Perfect Speech when her kid probably wrote it the night before. HE READ OFF LOOSE LEAF PAPER, STUMBLED, and DIDN'T REALLY SAY ANYTHING. HOW COULD HE WIN $500?
This is when my coach tells me that she loathes this other coach, and we form a telepathic alliance against her and this $500 richer weightlifter from the high school across town, who is beaming with pride as his dad pats him on the back and his mom looks over her shoulder at me.
This story has a point, though I seem to take forever to get there.
I worry whether anybody is sincere anymore, whether anyone knows what it feels like to believe something so deeply that nothing else seems possible. It's that spark to argument, that voice whose ethos is stronger than any statistic. Whether I'm sincere anymore.
It's moments like these I don't regret not being competitive in the cutthroat sense. I could never spam people to read my blog or question someone else's passion (I realize I've come close, but there are exceptions to every rule, right?), because I feel that ruins the sincerity and quality of myself as a blogger contestant.
And this is more about just some blogsite, it's about grades, about jobs, about life: I don't want to cheat the system; I want to win fair and square. If it isn't to be won that way, make me a new contest. Because once you lose the passion, it's just a game of strategy, and where does it go from there?
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