More Than A Trophy

Wins and losses and everything in between are only things I’ve done. They are PART of me, but they are NOT me.

I had a trophy room once.

It wasn’t anything special, more a room with stuff that just happened to have trophies in it. A collection of artifacts representing some things I did once, proudly displayed atop a few rickety wooden shelves.

I’m not sure why, exactly, but I carted those absurd things around from home to home and city to city, collecting dust and taking up room when I didn’t have any. I just couldn’t let them go. Until one day, one of them broke, and I felt nothing.

Why was I carrying around a dozen bobbles that I didn’t care about? Why had I ever cared to begin with? I couldn’t make it make sense, so I pitched them. All of them. And it felt good.

What else had I been carrying with me all these years? Was it furniture I hated and clothes I never wore, or was it something deeper? Something else that needed to be destroyed. And would I feel even better if I was equally brave in my pruning?

It took me a while, but I finally realized what made me feel so good about trashing my trophies; I wasn’t so much killing golden calves, as letting go of the past. Even if it was a past I was proud of.

My trophies, listen because this is important, are not me. If they were, that would mean my mistakes are me as well, and I can’t believe that. Else why go on living? No, wins and losses and everything in between are only things I’ve done. They are PART of me, but they are NOT me.

That’s big when you get there. Freeing in a way that takes limits off the future and plucks pain from the present.

We claim that our past mistakes do not define us, while at the same time, we carry around a handful of prizes to prove we were good at something once. Well, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t only be your past when it suits you and not when it doesn’t. Either the past isn’t you, including your trophies, or it is, including your mistakes. Which is it?

I had a trophy room once. I traded it for the possibility of so much more.