Everything is a Competition

But if you’re a woman, the rules change the moment you figure them out

The man who taught me how to be a great professor also told me to wear my hair in a ponytail.

I was up for my first full-time tenured professor position. His position. He was retiring and had chosen me to fill his enormous shoes. He was large in both body size and personality, the kind of professor students quote for decades, the kind who fills a room before he opens his mouth. He was determined that I get this job so he coached me, making sure I was prepared to answer the kinds of questions asked by college hiring committees. I made it to the top three.

The final hiring decision belonged to the college president, a strong woman who he’d gone head-to-head with on numerous occasions. He gave me his advice.

Tone it down. She’ll be intimidated by you. Dress down. Wear your hair up. Maybe a ponytail.

I did what he said. I didn’t wear my pink suit with the cropped blazer. I didn’t wear my layered blonde hair down. Instead, I borrowed a navy blue Ann Taylor suit from my best friend and tied my hair back in a ponytail. I toned it down and I got the job.

He took me out to lunch to celebrate and gave me more tips.

Buy the student media staff pizza but don’t let them take advantage of you.

Keep your head down and don’t piss anyone in administration off until you get tenure.

Don’t shit where you eat.

And then, out of nowhere, he asked if my boyfriend had proposed yet. The man I was seeing. The man I would eventually marry. He hadn’t.

Then came the confession.

If you were mine, I’d whisk you off into the sunset and never look back.

I sat there drinking my iced tea, not knowing how to respond, so I went with the kind of answer a woman gives a man when she wants to end a conversation while staying respectful.

Thanks, that’s very sweet.

This is the man who had coached me to make myself smaller so another woman wouldn’t feel threatened. He had worried I might intimidate her just by being myself and yet he saw no contradiction in sitting across from me making his case. That he knew what to do with me. That I was worth a sunset and a marriage proposal.

He made me small for her but I was plenty for him. I never stopped wondering if I would have gotten the job anyway. Would she have liked me exactly as I was, pink suit and all? By following his advice, I hadn't just changed my hair and clothes. I pre-judged her. I accepted his version of her before she ever had the chance to have the version of me.

If that isn’t the oldest story about women, I don’t know what is.

But looking back, I learned this lesson long before he taught it to me.

My mother believed in me the way only mothers can, completely and irrationally with an intensity that left no room for doubt. She would tell me there was no competition because I was the best at everything. She said it as a a fact, like something that didn’t require any further discussion. And in the next breath she’d tell me: You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

She wasn’t wrong about either thing. That’s what made it so hard. She was handing me two truths that could not both fit in the same body. You are exceptional, but be careful how you show it. You are the best, but the world will not always thank you for acting like it. Go get everything, but smile while you’re doing it. Don’t scare anyone.

I grew up fluent in this contradiction. What that looked like for me was me smiling, nodding, and tamping it down until something finally snaps and I become a person I can’t entirely explain or defend.

Like board games.

I am so competitive that I once told my entire family that they sucked and walked out of a Scrabble game.

I was in my thirties. My son and I were arguing over a word. Everyone sided with him. I grabbed the glass of wine I’d been nursing all evening, pushed back my chair, looked at the people who have loved me my entire life, and rendered my verdict.

You all suck.

My mother did not consider this honey.

I wish I could say that the Scrabble game is the most embarrassing example. The same force that sent me storming out of a board game in my thirties is the same force that makes me lie awake at night thinking about a 0.3.

I’m a professor with a 4.7 out of 5.0 rating on Rate My Professor. Do you know what I think about that 4.7? I think about the 0.3. I think about whoever gave me less than five stars, what I said or did that made one student withhold a perfect score, what they needed that I didn’t give them. A 4.7, by any reasonable measure is pretty great. I know it the way I know my mother thought I was the best at everything.

And I still want the five.

So I go back and make the lectures better. I study the professors in my field with the five star scores. I am, in the most absurd way possible, competing for a perfect score on a website that students scroll through between classes on their phones.

And then there were the student media conferences.

I was a college student media adviser and my students competed in journalism competitions, not the Pulitzer, but you would not have known that from my energy. I made sure they submitted their very best work. I made sure they were all given matching custom made t-shirts because if you’re going to walk into a room full of competitors, you might as well walk in looking like a team, a force. I would sit beside them as they waited for the winners to be announced and I’m pretty sure my seat was vibrating. I know for sure that my heart was racing right along with theirs.

Every time we won big, I would lose my voice screaming and cheering for them. And if they lost to another college, I would sit in silence thinking: the judges were wrong. I would tell them that winning isn’t everything, that they did their very best and should be proud of themselves, but on the inside I was thinking: we were robbed.

I mean, come on. I was their coach. I knew they were the best because I had made them the best the same way someone once made me believe I was the best. The same way a woman once told me there was no competition because I was going to win.

Sound familiar, Mom?

This is what competition does when it has nowhere to go. It doesn’t just live in the big moments like the job interview or the book deal. It lives in the small ones too. The constant monitoring of whether you’re enough.

What I’ve come to understand as a woman is that you are never playing one game. You are always playing two.

The first game is the one everyone can see like the job, the pitch, the byline, the promotion. You prepare for this game and you get good at it.

The second game has a rulebook that exists but no one will give it to you. You have to learn it by losing. By being called too much, too aggressive, too ambitious. By watching a man do the exact same thing you just did and get called a leader for it. By being told by a man who claimed to believe in you more than anyone, to pull your hair back and tone it down so the woman interviewing you wouldn’t feel threatened.

And then there are other women, which is its own complicated territory. We’ve gotten better at performing solidarity. We like the posts, share the wins, and show up with encouraging comments. But when someone else gets the one thing we wanted, something inside of us stirs. Not because of her. Because of us.

We’ve been conditioned to be pitted against each other, and even when we resist, it’s still there. Our mind plays tricks on us and we conclude that some women are not really our allies and others are not really our competition. We spend time trying to sort it out which is exhausting work that men are never asked to do.

The man who mentored me was not a villain. He believed in me and handed me a future with both hands. He also told me to sand down my edges to receive it.

This is what the second game does. It doesn’t stay with the hiring committee or a professor rating website. It follows you to a place where you find yourself competing for your own sense of worth.

We live in a world that says women who compete too openly are problems to be managed. Take your drive, your talent, and your ambition and pull it all back into a neat and tidy ponytail.

I’ve been told not to get my hopes up by people who thought they were protecting me but I have to wonder, from what? From wanting things? From believing I might actually get them? Maybe my competitiveness is deep rooted in optimism. Maybe I believe that I’m capable and haven’t given up on the idea that putting in an effort results in a positive outcome. Or maybe I just hate losing.

My family still laughs about the Scrabble game. I laugh too. And then I ask if they want to play again and they all suddenly have somewhere else to be.

I’ll never stop competing. Somewhere between my mother telling me I was the best at everything and a man handing me my career while asking me to change myself for it, I realized that my competitiveness was never the problem.

The terms are.