I’m kneeling in front of my tennis bag, at the center court. My vision’s blurry, either because I’m tired and dehydrated or because the sun’s just gone down. I recount the balls I brought and check the brand, making sure no one slipped my property in their pockets. In the distance, my opponent walks toward the direction of the gym, the back of his shirt darkened with sweat. I turn away and focus on packing my things.
I lost. Again.
I don’t want to think about the game, about my flubs and exaggerated reaches. I don’t want to think of the failed serves and slices. But I do. The thoughts roll over and over in my head, along with one thought that lets me know what to do next.
You know, a freezing shower would feel nice right about now.
Losing isn’t a great feeling. It demoralizes you, causes you to become more erratic and desperate to win, only for the desperation to blind you from seeing what to do next.
When I say “lose,” it doesn’t solely apply to sports. Losing can be anything that attacks your happiness—a poor grade on an exam, a breakup, your parents divorcing, getting evicted, etc. Losing is just as common as winning, but the problem is most of our wins are subtle—finishing your favorite book, making breakfast, waking up on time—while our losses are always more pronounced. To make matters worse, losses will become familiar to you in college. In my first year, I’ve made many connections with people, only to find out that some weren’t as truthful with me as I made them out to be. Suck-up, manipulator, weak. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. But the truth is, I’m grateful for my losses.
Now, before you berate me for seemingly setting you up with another cliché, hear me out. That saying, “your losses are more valuable than your wins”; it’s baloney. You don’t learn from your losses. No one in the history of mankind has ever learned more from losing than they have from winning. Just ask Caesar.
If you lost, you lost. That moment will never have an undo button where you retain all your memories of your past mistakes so you can correct yourself in this new timeline. What’s more, your wins and losses are of equal value, because whatever determines a personal win or loss is whether or not it raises or lowers your self-esteem. Interesting, right?
So why do people quote that inspirational poster on their dormitory boards? Because losing inevitably leads to something else: moving on. The ability to continue, to endure your losses, to be persistent is the diamond in the gargantuan rough. It’s the most valuable part of any experience because it shows the world you can handle its weight and walls. But more importantly, it shows you are not so easily beaten.
Maybe it’s not ideal. Maybe you don’t want to lose, and that’s understandable. But if you fear losing, then that’s something else entirely. A quote that popped up in my head as I was playing helped motivate me to keep playing my best, even as my opponent was racking up points. “If you are afraid of losing, then you have already lost.” Maybe the fear’s there, in the back of your head somewhere. Don’t look at it. It hurts—both literally and figuratively. If you tell yourself that you’re afraid of losing, then your consciousness opened the door to that fear, and it will enter and swell up until it’s all you can think about. The fear of losing is a cancer, and letting yourself, your happiness, and your actions being controlled by that fear makes you a terminal patient.
Jump back to losing. As mentioned beforehand, it’s like winning in the sense that it’s entirely subjective. It’s also like winning because by focusing on the loss, you don’t go on. If anything, the loss will brainwash you exactly as fear can. The memory’s on loop, and the image is enhanced. You can pinpoint the exact moment in time in which your happiness plummets. You zoom in on the memory, and the moment is in full view for your masochistic pleasure.
Did I bring up a bad memory? Good. You haven’t really moved on, then. You haven’t accepted that the event happened, and there’s nothing you can do. My roommate’s currently in our room, mulling over his ex, constantly bringing her up in conversation and holding her personality on a high pedestal as a bar he wants other girls to reach. He’s shown no indication of accepting the breakup and looking to the future, regardless of the number of times I nudge him in the right direction.
Losing appears momentarily in the present, then vanished in the folds of the past. Nothing in the past can bring as much happiness as the moments in the present. I’m speaking from personal experience. A friend of mine passed away about five years ago, and I’ve spent those five years thinking of how I should have seen the signs on his last day, and how I should’ve told someone. Anyone. His passing hit some harder than others, but as someone who dived into depression, it stuck with me the most. I held on to the loss tight, and it squeezed me back. Every time I went with my mother to church, I would constantly remind myself that I had done nothing, and I would pray that one day I could redeem myself. But again, life doesn’t come with an undo button, as much as you want one to pop out of nowhere. Now, I look back at the loss and realize that it didn’t define him. It didn’t show who he was, a refreshing bright ball of energy and a positive attitude.
Losses don’t define you. They don’t show your whole self. They don’t show your limits or your capabilities. They aren’t you. So don’t do yourself the injustice of letting them take over your life, and move on.
Luis Vazquez-Vega is currently a student at SUNY New Paltz. He aspires to write his first novel before he graduates.
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