Who Are you Competing With?

Who should you be competing with...?

I have mentioned in the past that I used to do ballet. It was a challenge which made me very interested in taking it on. Ballet is hard, and it is not something that should be undertaken with any seriousness if a person doesn’t know what that world can be like. It is fiercely competitive… or, at least it was when I was doing it.

When I entered ballet I was very little, and the Mistress that I trained under did not care about that one bit. She was a very strict woman that was not there training children. She was training future ballerinas that had to develop a strong work ethic, and be able to carry a great deal of pressure from under which they could still find ways to succeed. Not to mention that she was going to do everything in her power to remind us that we could either get it right, die practicing, or leave immediately.

I excelled in the brutality of it. Most people have the impression that ballet is very graceful and beautiful, but what it does to your body is pretty devastating in the long and in many ways, the short term.

Ballet involves a lot of pain. I have a high pain threshold, and I have heard this has to do with the processing of pain being reduced in psychopathy. In that, I probably did better.

Ballet involved at the time, I have no idea what the practices are now as the current generation seems to need a trophy for getting out of bed in the morning, a lot of extreme criticism, drive, competitiveness, shrewdness, and perseverance. My Mistress would say things like, do it until you get it right, or until your feet bleed, whichever comes first. But don’t you dare bleed on my sprung floor.

You had to have the willingness to work and be the best, and a lot of people crumbled under this. I didn’t have a problem with it, and in fact, I respond better to it. Was it because I am psychopathic? Maybe partially, but there is a lot that had to do more with me as a person. I had a great deal of energy. Ballet gave me a place to focus it. I liked pushing myself because I like challenging myself. Ballet provided that. That’s me as a person though. I have a personality that is there partially because of, and partially in spite of, and partially melded with psychopathy. Psychopathy is not all of me though.

Where I think the psychopathy likely helped me was being ruthless. Ballet, back when I was doing it, again it may be different and rather benign now, was not about being friendly with other dancers. I recall in the first class I had, I think I was three, my Mistress sat the class of little girls down, no boys at the time in that class, and said to us;

“This is not a place where you come to make friends that will last your whole life. This is not Little League. You see those girls to your right and on your left? The girls sitting behind you? These are not your friends. You will not play together, you will not spend the night at each other’s houses. These girls are your competition, and don’t you ever forget it.”

This was a difficult speech for a lot of girls. Some cried because they thought they were being yelled at. I didn’t. It made sense to me, so let’s dance. She reduced many a dancer to a hysterical wreck, and then denounced them saying they had no business in her classes.

A lot of girls washed out, and a lot had serious issues with her methods. I excelled under her. You want me to work harder? I will work harder than that. You want that landing more clean, those fouettés more controlled? Not a problem. It will be perfection by the end of the day. Whatever bar you set, I will exceed it. The harder it is, the better.

This is how my mind works. I have always challenged myself, and have never cared what anyone else was doing around me. They had nothing to do with me. I can’t imagine someone else’s performance having anything to do with how well I did. If I failed, I failed. If I succeeded, I succeeded. No one else to take credit, no one else to blame.

I see that humans in general like to compete, though I will admit a total lack of understanding of what that gives to them. Recently I was playing a new video game. Everyone in our house has this game, but it is a single-player game. It isn’t something that makes us head-to-head compete, and it doesn’t have anything to offer if you do better than someone else in the game. This is just my sort of game. I don’t want to play with anyone else because they get in my way, and interfere with my good time. This game prompted a conversation with a friend which reminded me of something from my past.

I used to sometimes play with others. There was a PS2 game called, Gauntlet. It was a full game that you could play with up to four other people. I had roommates and they liked to play it as well. In this game, you played one of four classes. I always liked the Valkyrie:

When you play this game you have to share resources if you are playing with others. You have to share keys, potions, food, and gold. Something that I learned pretty quickly playing this game was that my roommates were inherently competitive and they were also greedy. Whenever there was a chest or a potion, they would rush to get it. I am not much of a team player myself, as I mentioned above, but I didn’t have the need to get things before the people I was playing with. I simply lacked that competitiveness that they were showing. They wanted me to keep playing with them, so I came up with a very fitting solution for how I play.

When playing Gauntlet you can replay the game or join someone else’s game with your character. That meant that I could take my valkyrie and run her through the game many times over on my own, and max her out. She had all the keys she needed, she had health that basically couldn’t be touched, and I nearly never used potions. I also maxed out her gold. At the end of each stage, if you were in need of keys, potions, food, or upgrades, you could buy them. It didn’t matter if I picked anything like that up in the level, because I had all the money and could simply replenish at the end of the level.

This suited me perfectly. I could play with others like they wanted me to, but I didn’t have to worry about competing with them, nor them with me, which was ultimately my goal. This memory come up because of this new game, and my friend wanting to know what level I was at. Why? Because she wants to pass me. This is such a fundamental difference in how she plays versus how I do. I don’t care where anyone else is in a game. I am playing it for me, and the only person that I want to do better than is me five minutes ago. I have a saying:

Competition

If you are competing with anyone other than yourself, you have already surrendered the game

I wonder though if I might be wrong about this when it comes to neurotypicals. Perhaps they do require someone else to compete with. Perhaps it brings some level of satisfaction and drive to an exchange that encourages growth through that engagement. Psychopaths are inherently individuals that are disconnected from others in ways that others rely on for mere survival. I have found through the years that my abject indifference to the need of others to compete with me can infuriate them. It has been vexing.

I can sort out that it can appear that I don’t see them as worthy competition, but that injects a level of consideration that I simply don’t have. It isn’t that I don’t consider them worthy, I don’t consider them at all. I wonder if this difference in how neurotypicals and psychopaths think is much more deeply rooted than I originally assumed. Perhaps it is because we are so individualistic that we don’t consider others in our pursuits, and perhaps it is because of neurotypicals’ interconnectivity that they consider others as a bar to exceed.

I don’t really have an answer, but I think that I have come to the conclusion that the hardwiring is that way for a reason, and that each functionality has contributed to the world in highly beneficial ways in their own right.