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 I am no stranger to losing. 

I had an older brother, after all. 

I say this not in any particularly spiteful way. As a matter of fact, hindsight suggests that the competition that I felt was natural between us turns out to be more of a delusion on my part than anything else. At the same time, this didn't mean that I wasn't often on the short end of the stick when it came to most of the trials that presented us. Again, if anything, my older brother showed some remarkable patience with me when it came to my need to try and assert myself beyond the bounds of our birth order. He had a three year and nine month head start and my best efforts to usurp that advantage were generally met with frustration. 

And then there was the kid down the street. The one who I latched onto as my best friend starting in kindergarten, but couldn't imagine leaving behind until I was in eighth grade. For him, the world was a staged version of Survivor before reality TV ever existed. Collecting prizes from cereal boxes, playing basketball on his driveway, board games of any stripe, and anything that might have appeared to include an element of chance became a way to impress his domination over me and most of the other kids in the neighborhood. I was his patsy. I worried that if I declined the chance to be humiliated in the contest of his choosing that I might lose my tenuous standing in the overall scheme of things on our street. 

What I never took into account at the time was the reason for this kid's compulsion to be in direct competition with his peers. Upon reflection, it seems that the distance between him and his older brothers were both more than eight years older than he was, leaving him little in the way of traditional sibling rivalry. On those rare occasions when his older brother would come out to the back yard to play football with us, he took special care to pound and humiliate his much smaller kin. I can remember one instance that ended up with the smaller one in tears, causing him to take a lap around the house and upon his return he suggested that we do anything else but play football. 

He wasn't there to be humiliated. 

However, it seemed that I was. And so for years I kept showing up thinking that I could somehow get the upper hand in some game or tournament. It never occurred to me that I was more than a match for him academically, and if his world was so great, why was he always hanging around my house looking for a handout of Snickers bars and Kool-Aid? Never, that is, until my world began to open up to kids with similar interests and backgrounds when I moved on to junior and senior high school. 

By this time, the challenges I had once felt between my older brother and I had dissipated into a much friendlier rivalry. A supportive version that brought me to where I am today. I don't mind losing so much anymore because I have discovered that on a long enough timeline, it all evens out. 

What a relief.