You Already Win
How to press pause on all the striving and hail yourself for just being.
In high school, I used to run track. I never won a race. I rarely earned points for the team. The best I could hope for was third place in the one- or two-mile, and that was only if the other school’s team had a shallow bench.
During the end-of-season ceremony, when my coach handed me my participation certificate, he said, “Heather is not the most talented runner. But she tries the hardest.”
Oof. Tries Hardest. It was neither compliment nor cut-down. Just truth. And it remains so. I’m not the most talented at anything. I just work. A lot. Sometimes too much.
[Image: Spokes of a tall white bridge against a blue sky.]
One of the joys of graduating high school was that I could quit caring about racing and just run for fun. (I know, I know. Some of you are hooking your eyebrows over that word combo: fun/run.) I do not clock impressive miles on my sneakers. I sometimes don’t run for weeks. But running clears my head, gets me into my body, and gives me an excuse to blast Shakira into my old-school earbuds with actual dangling chords. (Darn you, Apple, why won’t the new operating system sync with ancient iPods?)
This is not a commercial for running, I promise.
The achievement mindset, though, is pernicious. And it creeps up on me at unexpected times. Sometimes I start paying more attention to my 3-mile time. I check my pace at each mile and feel pleased or bummed. I start wondering, Maybe I could run four miles at this faster pace? Maybe I should run five or six miles, at any pace? In fact, why am I not running eight miles on a Sunday morning?
[Image: the top of the photo is the bottom of a white and black watch, with the log “Garmin” and the digital reading: “Cal 298.” The bottom half is a set of my blurry legs and feet, wearing dark blue sneakers and leggings.]
This “must achieve” thinking probably comes with my American citizenship. Either that, or my Enneagram number—Four (The Romantic) but my weak Three-wing (The Achiever) flaps at unexpected times. Meanwhile, my Garmin watch just told me—for real—to “MOVE!” So maybe it’s my choice of timepiece.
But did you know that if you walk or run or otherwise engage in moderate cardiovascular activity five times a week for thirty minutes, you significantly reduce your risk of complex bummer heart stuff? Of course you do. You’re very smart. You read articles and tolerate lectures from your doctor.
In all fairness, I knew this, too. I used to dismiss it because I was young and still had adult-onset acne. But I’m now the age where doctors do screenings for complex bummer heart stuff, and I’m less concerned about my adult-onset acne, more concerned about leaving this beautiful world with its gorgeous expansive sky and my beautiful people in it.
So, recently it dawned on me: If I run five times a week for thirty minutes, at any pace, at such a slow pace that I’m practically walking, or actually walking, I’m already winning. I’m already meeting the most important requirements for exercise: to keep me alive.
And so I got to thinking. How often are we already winning? If you’re like me, your home is cluttered with overdue library books, wrinkled clean laundry you haven’t folded, floor filth you swear you just wiped four weeks ago so why is it back again?
But the “You already win” mindset can work here, too. Do you have a safe home for you and your beautifuls? You do? You win! You don’t need to be any better than that—unless of course you want to. If so, then tidy to your heart’s desire.
Or say your kid poured all their effort into an actual game of sport, like soccer, where winning and losing are clearcut, and they did everything they could to win, but they lost. And then they were swarmed in a hug from their brother or best friend, who held them while they wept? I’m pretty sure they already won.
[Image: My kids on the beach, staring into the ocean’s expanse. One has her arm around the other.]
Today I sat in a small windowless room, looking at nothing but a tall garbage bin of discarded pink hospital robes, wearing little more than a giant untied robe myself. I was waiting for the doctor to examine my follow-up mammogram. Were the spots in the first mammogram terrible or no big deal? Was this the beginning of a new era in my life, a big fat “After” roaring in to change it all, or just a blip on a Thursday? The large garbage bin of worn gowns refused to answer.
The gowns were probably worn by a few dozen women who also waited. Some of them got “winning” news, some “losing.” I sat with the reality that I could receive either one. I didn’t check my phone as I waited, didn’t read a book. I just clutched my huge gown closed and breathed with my fear and waited for feet to come down the hallway. They did, but walked past my door. They did again, walking past my door.
I was not winning. But I had this strange, oh-so-slight feeling that I’d also already won. Because I was showing up to the hard thing. I was taking care of my tender body. I was sitting with the truth of this fragile life. I was not looking away from my impermanence. Me, in my giant untied soft-as-felt robe. Me, asking the Great Source I call God to give me peace and love, peace and love.
It was a strange form of winning, one that wouldn’t be rewarded with a medal, one that didn’t depend on others’ losing. Maybe it was closer to a blessing.
The doctor finally came to say she was not concerned.
There’s a lot of striving in this world. Goal-setting. Reaching. And I don’t knock any of that. It can be useful and fun to name an aim and try for it. But it can also be really tiring.
And there’s also a lot of loss in this world, of feeling that we’ve missed out, fallen short, gotten dealt shit luck. We came in last or couldn’t finish it at all. This world is filled with surprises we call disappointments. They sink into our guts like stones. Some of them are huge. And in the past two years, they’ve multiplied.
I’m not interested in spinning grief into sunshine, or knitting flat slogans from silver linings. But I am curious about this phrase, You Already Win, and how it might be almost as true—maybe even as true—as all our grief, and all our longing, and all our desire.
I’m interested in how it might take the pressure off, especially in this InstaPinTok culture.
And I’m interested in how it might help us flip the definition of winning, shake all the pyramid-schemes upside-down, and help us receive new truths about our lives. Like that perhaps our lives, no matter what we do with them, are gifts.
Let me know if you have an “I Already Win” moment. And let me know if you have a good song to run to, because I’m bored of my playlist.
Friends, The Slow Take is so very sporadic, mostly because I’m usually writing other things. I’ll share a round-up soon of what I’ve published lately.
In the meantime, here’s a poem I published this spring in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature. It’s called “To the Comic Who Says Her Critic is Missing a Chromosome.” It’s about reading Tina Fey’s BOSSYPANTS just after learning that my first baby, Fiona, was missing a bit of her fourth chromosome.
(Fiona, by the way, is another “You Already Win” moment. Or lifetime of moments.)