Having recently shared my past experiences with struggles in school caused by competition with my classmates, I, despite having believed that I would be poorly received and that the topic was too specific and should perhaps be broader, was pleasantly surprised to see that many of my peers sympathized with and understood it, even sharing their own struggles with me in turn. Apart from merely dissuading any fears as to the relevancy of my experience, the information I was given was also valuable because it only reinforced to me that competition, at least in the form practiced in the gifted magnet to which I belong, is generally negative for a multitude of reasons, although importantly, through recent research I conducted while working on this essay, I also learned that this absolute characterization comes with several caveats and that it may also have positive properties. 

For now, to explain what exactly the experiences that led to me developing this idea of counterproductive competition in the first place were, they began with my struggle to maintain my self-esteem in middle school: in seventh grade, one specific class I was placed into drove me to the verge of despondence, and crucially, the dissonance that arose from this was even more extreme than what I experienced this year when I noticed that most other students were in AP biology because I truly was the one and only magnet student in the class. Unlike now, when most of my closest friends are in my lower classes and make them tolerable, every single one of my peers was on a higher or even high school level curriculum, and after an initial period of denial and confusion over where all of my friends went for their classes, I realized the truth, and immediately fell into fear as I could not rationalize why even the most apathetic and uninvolved of my peers were still deemed, in my eyes, “smarter” than me. It is this that I think above all else motivated me to fight and achieve good grades, which, while seemingly being positive, began to brew negative competition as it came to my attention that some of the students on the upper echelon of achievement and in the highest classes were, in fact, ones whom I had previously known in elementary school and learned with. As I could not rationalize their skills as having resulted from more vigorous education in their youth, I became convinced that my placement had to have been a mistake and that I needed to prove this by trying as hard as possible in my other classes, even though I already had A’s in them and this meant absolutely nothing. I tried to outdo my peers by writing something more akin to essays when daily homework was due and bloated graduate papers when essays were due, all to little acclaim beyond that which I was able to wring from myself for the purpose of attempting to heal my shattered self-esteem and certainly little attention beyond amusement from the classmates I was supposedly competing with. This hollow circle of projecting one’s own struggles onto classmates and then vanquishing them while ignoring the exhaustion and sadness that came from working so much and seeing all peers as enemies is what I and many others fell into, and it is why I consider this sort of competition a trap that promises closure and achievement while in actuality being an insurmountable mountain. 

However, as I brought up previously, I was, in fact, motivated to fight for the best grades possible because of the sense of competition that I felt, and indeed, because of this, it is possible to argue that competition can be good for students. Nevertheless, one must draw a distinction between a healthy competition, of the kind seen when, for instance, two friends decide to make an innocent bet as to who can get a better grade and do not share any mutual enmity, a student decides to partake in a robotics competition because of their interest in the subject and desire to move up in the field, or, yes, when I was driven to seek better grades because of a desire to avenge my pride and maintain my self-esteem, and that which forces students to feel as though they are fighting for their lives and trying in vain to stay “good enough” against the encroaching advance of self-doubt and hatred. This dichotomy is best summarized by American Heritage schools in their statement that positive, regulated competition leads to increased productivity and socialization but corrupts into anxiety if its intensity goes unchecked and the individual involved does not fly past goalposts without acknowledging and celebrating them. The latter, negative kind can evidently fester under the surface of what is ostensibly a positive application of competition, and I believe that it, while feeling the same, primarily differs in that it, despite initially appearing selfish due to its prioritization of self-esteem above all else, is in fact motivated by perceived outwards factors that may not even exist and manifests inwards: in my case, the outwards factors that led to the intensification were the expectations that I thought existed for students in the magnet and the admittedly clear disrespect some students had for lower classes, and rather than motivating me to act in good nature over this and perhaps challenge these opinions directly by studying higher fields and showing that I was not going to let my placement impede my development, I kept quiet and channeled everything to other subjects, which did nothing to truly help me. My ignorance on the positive form of competition also informed my initial decision to refer to it as a whole negatively, which I maintained was completely correct up until this essay. 

The main issue, at the end of the day, is that of delusion: negative competition in the magnet, of the kind to which I am referring to and which clearly, as evidenced by the sympathetic response my own divulgence received as well as studies from the likes of Innerspace Counseling that refer to perfectionism and anxiety over placing obsessively high standards on oneself as one of the primary issues facing gifted youth both affects many students and is not a struggle that is easy to admit to having, harms students by making them delude themselves into fighting for some lofty and quite possibly pointless ideal, when poor self-esteem should be countered by true progress in other fields such as all of the extracurriculars and fields I ignored and turned down to just keep needlessly working, an understanding of its causes, and an assurance that, for the most part, friends do not wish to insult each other over something as simple as class placement and that hatred in response to this is folly. In my case, delusion also took the form of denial of my class placement and in turn led me to, in a sense, attempting to prove that I was just as smart as them by overcompensating for my supposed lack of intelligence by internally competing with others in all other subjects. However, the very fact that students in the magnet, an institution where acceptance unto itself is already an achievement worth celebrating and proof of intelligence, are worried about lacking such intelligence shows just how disconnected from reality the issue of competitive anxiety and the state it drives people into is, and in many cases, including mine, it is congruent with the imposter syndrome many people thrust into high positions akin to those in the magnet feel that makes them forget just how far they came to get to them and how worthy they are; I certainly did, and that was a major source of my troubles. 

As such, with this all in mind, one should always, even if they are not in any gifted magnet and simply experiencing anxiety over a desire to prove themselves in any potentially competitive situation they already fought for, look back at what it took to get there and consider that perhaps it isn’t worth sacrificing all they have for a small amount of additional glory that they, in truth, bestow upon themselves and that is thus proof that they can think positively of themselves regardless. Of course, it is also important to know that, as I mentioned previously, positive competition can bring about good things and at one point did for me, making the best advice that I can give to everyone that, like all things, competitiveness as a whole is a boon if used properly and can bring about great success, if only one remembers to not throw themselves headfirst into it with no concern for anything else: they must keep their other needs, social and emotional and all in between, in mind and look at their peers once in a while to confirm they are not fighting some sort of war for approval with them, as well as themselves to put all they’ve done and their own achievements into a praise-worthy, self-esteem boosting perspective. On this sense of finality and with the new information I researched, I must once more conclude that competition is negative in the form it often takes in the magnet, but that it can also be a useful gateway to all manner of advancements if it exists in a healthy context.