“Beach. You and I are very different, you seem to thrive on competition I don’t, how did you get to be so competitive?”
I fear my answer will be an anticlimax or not what is expected or assumed but, (I’ve visited this before), as a little boy, from the earliest age I can recall, I have always been a person to offer help, offer support or present myself as being available should I be required to help or aid somebody with anything at all and I can remember approaching friends, strangers, teachers alike, always with a “Hi. I’m Christopher … call me over if you need me” … right from infant school onwards.
And, on assisting, helping, joining in or helping out, I have always received that warm fuzzy feeling of “being appreciated” and that emotional currency, (rather than any monetary reward), has always driven me.
Life was tough in my own family home with a psychotic mother and a very disciplined father with my mother not shy in barking orders and my father not shy in carrying them out; usually ending up with me getting what in our house was known as “a hiding.” (Call it physical child abuse today)
As a little boy, being knocked over the back of the sofa was a not too unfamiliar occurrence or, on occasions, being hit so hard as to end up pirouetting across the room and taking out a 5ft tall free standing standard lamp … or finding myself thrown so hard against a glass ornament cabinet that the glass shelves would collapse, one dropping onto another.
One time, the wind blew the curtains in the kitchen and the curtains then brushed a box of OMO washing powder onto the floor, (a complete accident by nature), but, with the arrival of dad home from work, my mum would summon me to take responsibility for such accidents … and I would pay.
So … yes … I’m quite sure that me offering others help with this or that, (and receiving praise or compliments or appreciation for doing so), formed a fundamental part in me as a little boy, gaining a kind of approval I rarely witnessed or received at home.
As I grew older, these issues dissipated and, certainly, when I became a teen, (and a skinhead), my father, (who had still occasionally raised a hand to me), got rather a surprise when, now taller and stronger than him, I responded to his open threat of slapping me by delivering him a dose of what he had given me for much of my young life before taking him down completely and then watching him actually cry while he looked up at me pleading for mercy.
Thus … the thing you think you see in me, (of being competitive), is not really that at all. Rather, I have an innate inner drive to excel, to perform, to perfect and to achieve the very best I can, (in life), more as a self fuelling cycle that delivers me superhuman powers … and a discipline you would just never believe … all with the desire and goal of either getting stuff done well, writing well, performing sports well, driving well, etc etc … in order to either hear, read, see or feel that my mental or physical expenditure has been either appreciated or noticed in some way or another.
Actual physical, monetary recompense has always come my way as a bonus, (perhaps for excelling, perhaps for winning, perhaps for thinking or even, perhaps just for playing), so any concept of linking money or cash or compensation for doing ANYTHING is more a coincidence or a happenstance rather than actually seeking wealth or fame or celebrity on purpose.
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