Vanquishing the Competition (The Problem of Comparison, Part II)

When my mother-in-law first learned that Parker and I had an open marriage, she was pretty unhappy about it. (See my October 14, 2010 post, “Questions from My Mother-in-Law,” for the story of how she found us out.) She wrote us a distraught letter in which she asked us a bunch of questions, which Parker and I answered, and then she wrote us a reply – or shall I say a critique – in which she took us to task for various personality flaws. Selfishness was her main complaint, but there was another criticism leveled at me, specifically: competitiveness.

This is part of what she wrote in May 2003: At polyamory.org it says that some people just don’t get jealous. I think this might be true. I’ve always considered [Parker] as someone like that. [Viny], on the other hand, couldn’t even stand the fact that [Liz] had the first baby in the family. She admits that she was jealous when [Scott] had a girlfriend. And that [Scott] was jealous of [Viny's] third polyamoristic thing. [Viny] and [Scott] don’t seem like ideal candidates for polyamory, at least when things aren’t going in their favor. 

 

Well, that just burned me up: there she was, handing out prizes for polyamory's Ideal Candidate, and I wasn't even in the running!

Yeah, okay, I'm a sore loser.

Yeah, I often feel like I have something to prove.

It's a problem I'm working on (in order to prove that I don't always have to prove something, no doubt).

When I was in high school, I had a doppelganger nemesis we'll call Cindy. She and I shared a whole lot of demographic characteristics, and we even looked a lot alike. Growing up, we'd been part of the same gifted program, so we ended up in all the same classes, where she got better grades. We also shared the same interest in drama and improv. During final callbacks for school plays, it always came down to me and her, and she was always the one who walked away with the lead role. She was class president, whereas I was kind of a nerd. To top it all off, I had a crush on her boyfriend.

I hardly ever think about Cindy, and I don't envy her anymore – last I heard, she and her lawyer husband have three kids and live in Orange County – but twenty years ago, her presence in my life was like a perpetual eclipse.

There was a whole story I was telling myself at the time, in which I appeared as Silver Medal girl, forever doomed to be not-quite-best at anything. Can't I just be the best at SOMETHING, one tiny little thing? I complained in my journal. Will I always be the Queen of Mediocrity? And then felt guilty, of course, for not being consoled by the fact that I could have had things a whole lot worse.

So yesterday, when Parker was telling me about how he wants no part of the reality in which self-esteem is based on knowing one's place in a hierarchy, about how he doesn't think the supposed “real world” is any more real than the one each person invents for him- or herself, a world of singularity, in which “it's just you being you,” I was intrigued but skeptical.

“It's a little more complicated than that, don't you think?” I said.

“Look,” said Parker, “It's just an accident of evolution that we are set up this way. We're social animals, and so we've developed all these ways of assessing what others think of us. We have to know our place. Other animals don't have to have a self-esteem. Some animals are territorial loners; all that's required of them is a lot of hostility toward outsiders. For them, the question is not, 'Who's better?' it's, 'Who's still here when the fight is over?' Now, I'm not saying I want to be a territorial animal. It doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun. All I'm saying is that this supposedly objective view of reality, in which who you are depends on what other people say you are, isn't the only reality that's possible.”

So, Parker wants to live in a self-determined universe, to be the god who creates his own unique reality and lives out his own divine purpose.

Sounds lovely. No more competition: after all, it would be ludicrous for a single entity alone in his own universe to compare himself to any of the characters with which he peoples his dream of reality.

It's an interesting thought experiment – at the moment, Parker's still the undisputed Thought Experiment Champion – but I don't think thinking that way is going to work for me on a day-to-day basis. I can't shake the idea that there's an objective reality out there that's separate from me, a whole world full of entities over which I have no control (or, if I do have some control, it's not I as an individual, but rather I as part of something so enormous, so complex, that it's entirely beyond my ken just how I might be exercising that control, or what I might be willing into, or out of, existence).

It's funny: all the people I've ever known who admit to fantasizing that they might be the only real inhabitant in a self-created world – that other people, although they seem real enough, have no separate lives of their own – happen to be introverts. When I was a kid, my mother once confessed to me that, as a child, she wondered whether she might be the only person on the planet with an inner reality: perhaps everyone else was just a character in a long dream she was having. She seemed to think it might be a common childhood fantasy, something I probably thought about as well, but such a notion had never even occurred to me until she brought it up.

I also wonder whether the radical individualism that Parker seems to be espousing would work in more collectivistic societies. Maybe there's a Western vs. Eastern philosophical divide on how to overcome the problem of comparison. The mystical traditions of both cultures seem to end up with a similar result, though: erase the Other or erase the Self – either way, you've erased the gap between the two.

I want to end this post with two thoughts that kept coming up yesterday – it's kind of like a little “compare and contrast” exercise on the topic of comparing and contrasting, although I have no idea what it might mean:

1. I have, on a number of occasions, completely lost my sense of self. Sometimes, this has been an unpleasant experience, kind of like identity vertigo, but more often it's been ecstatic. My peak erotic experiences tend to be characterized by this erasure of boundaries between Self and Other.
2. As part of an experiment with stream-of-consciousness writing, at age 18, I wrote the following, even though it completely freaked me out to commit the words to paper: Chiasmic symmetry – the wall, me, the mirror, me, the wall. As though my existence is validated somehow by having two of me. If I ever come across another me I'll kill her. Supreme selfishness in rainy Chinatown. The smells of the cheap restaurants drifting in on the open air.