So, this weather. Am I Right? Random!
And that local sportsball team? Wild! Who’d have thunk it?
Everyone nice and comfortable after the small talk now? Great.
How much time and effort do you actually take to try and understand the person next to you?
Or, do we just think they are what they present on social media and the like?
What about when they reveal something deeper than that? Do we offer empathy? Or sympathy?
Maybe contempt for being vulnerable and showing “weakness”?
Or just outright indifference?
All of those things are fairly common human responses, but which one do you run with? And, possibly more importantly, why?
Simone Biles, I’ve heard, is good at gymnastics. Pretty good. Like, a LOT good. Best there has ever been good. How good the bloke at the pub would have been if “he didn’t twist his knee playing footy as a 7 year old” good.
But, she pulled out of a few events in her most recent outing at the Olympics. And now things are being said about her. Weirdly. How unlikely…
Some of those things said are supportive, some are critical. Some are doing what I’m doing right now, and trying to look at the perspective people have and the broader trends when it comes to public conversations about mental health.
I’d like to believe that all of them are intending to be constructive. But how constructive can one person be when they spend their time in the conversation talking about their perspective rather than trying to understand Simone’s?
So, I’m going to annoying you by asking some questions. As usual... Sucked in, you can’t leave now otherwise people will judge you for being an unfeeling monster with no interest in understanding why you decided to stop reading! (Like what I did there? Emotional blackmail at its finest)
Has anyone here heard of something known as performance punishment?
Geoff? Not surprised mate, that’s the lot of a sales rep.
Rhyanna? Yep, I knew you’d get it.
Basically, performance punishment is about how higher performance leads to higher standards and the demand to do more to maintain, if not increase performance, in order to not fail, or lose, or let people down, or be judged harshly for it.
Sounds fun right?
The value of being the best is that you get to know you are and feel like the best.
The price of being the best is the constantly litany of things required of you to become and stay the best.
That sounds like a lot of pressure after a while. To me, anyway. If you need a different example, watch Rocky 3. Promise it’ll make more sense.
Anyway.
When you’re the best, and you’ve won what there is to win as the best, what do you do then? Rest on your laurels? Bow out gracefully? Keep scratching and biting to stay in that ego fuelled place to maintain the identity of being The Best™? Maybe.
What if you decided to bow out as gracefully as you could, knowing the isn’t ever a great time to do it, knowing that to push beyond that point is to risk further damage to your mental and physical health?
What if the price of being the best wasn’t worth the value of being the best anymore?
What if pretending to be something other than a flawed human, admittedly a talent and driven flawed human, wasn’t worth the cost of being that “perfect” athlete/artist/leader/injured animal surrogate? What if it just wasn’t who you want to be anymore?
Enter Simone Biles.
The sheer fucking pressure that woman must feel, every time she steps up to the mat… And that’s just the gymnastics part of her life. Read up on a little of her past to see the level of epic this woman really is.
For a while, that pressure is what drives us on. But, at some point, the realisation that we are more than a title and a job description and a shiny piece of metal hanging around your neck starts to make us appreciate what parts of ourselves we have been ignoring for so long in order to get and keep those labels.
What if we could consider that about her? Give her the respect and empathy we’d like for ourselves, FROM ourselves first and foremost, that maybe she’s doing something for her. Not for someone else’s agenda.
Be it being outspoken on mental health so they can be a figurehead that brings prominence and relatability to the issue even if that’s not actually directly helping her with her particular plight. Or winning more shiny bits of metal for a country so some people who live there can feel good about how they come from the same place as another person who’s really good at something, thus escaping their own reality by coat-tailing hers.
I hope she does the things that help her feel healthier within herself, for herself.
I’ll go further than that. To walk away from something as big of a deal as she did, I KNOW she is.
I hope the people who feel compelled to have an opinion on the validity of her decision see this as an opportunity to invest in and understand their own perspective. (I won’t hold my breath on that hope, but we can hope, right?) I hope that the judgement that we find within ourselves is tempered with genuine care, rather than meeting an agenda and a standard that has nothing to do with us as an individual.
Mums who know the pressure of having to be Mum every day, day in and day out, and just fucking do it in the face of the guilt about not doing more, let alone all the other stuff beyond being a mum that matters more than we realise…
Dads who know the pressure needing to go out and earn money and make decisions, feeling its all on them, but don’t say a word about it because they worry that they’re the only one who struggles with it…
Kids who just want to make their parents/coaches/teachers/selves proud, even if they don’t actually enjoy what they are doing…
Bosses who know the company is really struggling, but don’t want to worry the staff by telling them, so they just do their best to get on with it and not blow up at the small things.
Staff who are watching their personal life crumble around them, but those deadlines are creeping up, and the boss just out of character yelled at them about it.
Literally everyone has stuff. Sometimes we forget that.
They handle it how they handle it, hopefully as best they can in as healthy a way as they can.
Judgement, from ourselves and others, doesn’t really help. If anything, it cheapens us. Takes us further from empathy and connection, and ourselves. So, the hole in ourselves and the divide between us deepens…
We will never truly know what it is to be someone else, to feel how they feel, to live how they live. But spending a little effort in the attempt to know, to understand, may hopefully offer something in the way of value to ourselves and our people that broadens our perspective on life and makes our experience of it all the richer.
I can’t say I know you Simone, but I can appreciate why you did what you did. I’m proud of you. And I am richer for what you did, for stepping on and stepping off the mat. Thank you.
Be kind, be smart, be your best you. No bar fights.
“It hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me to please other people. I wanted it to be for myself. But I was still doing it for other people” Simone Biles
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