Content note: this post refers to my eating disorder (without many specifics)
I’ve been driven to be The Best since I was little. It didn’t really matter what I was doing – maths, football, following rules, reading – I needed to feel like I was either already The Best, or on a very fast path to becoming The Best. Baby Me wasn’t just disinterested in activities that I struggled to master, but actively afraid of them, incapable of stomaching the feeling of being bad-to-mid at something. My perfectionism paralysed me in a lot of areas, and also made me an insufferable teammate when I was forced into group activities. (This was actually one of the biggest reasons my mum bought gaming consoles for our household, to expose me to something fun and rewarding, with minimal stakes, that I wasn’t perfect at first time. I imagine I would be even less fun to play games with if my mum hadn’t put in long hours encouraging me to engage with things even when I wasn’t winning.)
I’m sure y’all can infer the sorts of wounds that make a kid’s self-esteem contingent on being The Best. For me, these wounds festered throughout my adolescence, and I got competitive about dieting, driven to be the thinnest, to win in the battle against my own body. I wanted to be the best writer, maybe the funniest person in the room, maybe the best at seducing strangers on the internet, but more than anything I wanted to be the thinnest. In any given room, in my year group, in those pro-ana forums I crawled in secret, I wanted to be the thinnest.
Therapy (and a desire to eventually have babies) eventually pulled me away from this fixation, but only far enough to create room for a new one. I was dating now, and I needed to be The Best possible partner. After all, he could leave me at any time, for anyone. I had so many flaws, in my 16-year-old mind, and I had to address them. He liked alternative girls, so I spent some of my very limited money on (botched) piercings. He liked redheads, and at least once a month he had to tell me not to dye my hair red. He liked sex in particular ways, so that’s what he got from me. The whole time, as I was trying to reshape myself into someone who could keep him, I watched the horizon like a hawk for people prettier than me, funnier, thinner, kinkier, and if I thought I spotted one, that same I’m-not-The-Best terror flooded me. It was a miserable existence, and I only blame him for miseries unrelated to this one. This wound seemed almost as old as I was.
Nonmonogamy didn’t come into our relationship as a cure for this, but instead for unrelated anxieties I had about the permanence of “forever” and the possibility of missing out. (Essentially, I had fallen in love and moved in with a guy before ever even touching a boob, and at 17 the idea that I might die without doing so was genuinely a bit heartbreaking.) It was clumsy and painful with him, partly due to the trickiness of converting a monogamous relationship to anything else and partly for other reasons, but when I first saw the girls he was ogling on Tinder and realised that they were no longer my competition, an intense relief overtook me. I didn’t have to match these girls in hair colour or number of piercings or BMI or anything else, didn’t have to watch like a hawk for signs they were stealing my man, because we were sharing. A sense of sisterhood with women suddenly seemed a lot more possible.
That relationship ended, and I moved on, and I never went back to monogamy. Nonmonogamy has brought a huge amount of joy into my life in addition to the above relief, and I’m glad I saw through the hypercompetitive framework that monogamy encourages (especially amongst people of marginalised genders). There’s just this nagging feeling of insecurity I have, not about myself in comparison to any of my metamours specifically, but instead a more abstract question along the lines of, “if I’m not The Best, do I still have value? Am I still special? Will you still keep me, even if I’m not exceptional – and why?”
In trying to heal this, I’ve asked myself the possibly-brutal question of why I keep people in my life if they’re not The Best in every imaginable field. The answer is that 1. The specific and unique combination of characteristics they have, the way those characteristics and experiences interact with each other and the choices they make in response to those things are irreplicable and beautiful, and 2. A lot of the qualities I value in other people (kindness, curiosity, passion, etc) are things that are too nuanced to be measured and so the only person I’m constantly assessing to see whether they’re The Best is… me.
Monogamy gave me a sense of safety in the idea that I was The Best in at least some capacities – I must be, otherwise he’d have left me by now. Nonmonogamy is helping me to slowly, slowly unlearn my understanding of The Best as an achievable state and love as a meritocracy. Outside of relationships, I still find myself wanting to be The Best writer or The Best OT patient or The Best lots and lots of other things, but I’ve been prompted to question what drives that. What capitalism (and, I suspect, especially my stint at private school) taught me was a healthy drive to achieve was actually an anxiety fuelled by framing the world as a competitive place where comparing myself to others was critical to success, or even survival. That does not have to be the case, and regardless of the monogamy thing, it’s my opinion the more of us that try to unlearn our perception of other humans as competitors, the kinder and happier a place the world will be.
Relatable af