Being a winner is the best. Everyone says so.
Spend five minutes on social media and you are constantly being fed ideas about how you can be fitter, thinner, richer, happier, and more successful. Have more. Be more. Do more. Success is presented as constant and effortless…if only you can reach it.
But what if making it to the top wasn’t what it’s all about?
Everyone loves to show summit photos, say how many miles they ran, how clean they eat, how effortlessly they travel, how easy everything is, how much better you feel. What are we really losing, though, by only showing the best, glossy, highly curated wins?
Certainly, it couldn’t be worse than being labeled a loser.
Of course, no one is perfect or curated even close to all the time. Let’s be honest, even the best of us reach that metric only very occasionally.
Lately, I’ve been feeling this sting through my photography.
Putting yourself out there—to social media, galleries, open calls, inquiries—only to flop, or worse, be met with dreaded silence.
Fun.
It took me a long time to realize that almost everyone creative goes through this. Almost no one talks about it, though. We are only shown the best, or the highly curated “fails.” The climb, as we all know, though, is often messy, exhausting, and hot.
Sharing something you care about feels a bit like the beginning of a hike at one in the morning. Everything feels unsteady. Landmarks are gone. The wind bites, you’re tired, your hands are numb. For some reason, you keep moving.
Photography has opened me up to criticism that is sometimes genuinely helpful, and sometimes quietly cutting.
“Some of these are good…”
“Are you still doing that camera thing?”
Little seeds of doubt planted on top of missed opportunities, silence, and rejection.
People often equate winning with being the best, but that is not always true. Taste is subjective. Timing matters. Lighting matters. Words matter. Luck matters. Sometimes all of those things push one person over the edge while another remains unseen.
So why keep doing it?
Because. The risk of never trying hurts more than rejection ever could.
Quietly working for years with no one watching, while safe, also keeps you small.
Buried beneath all of the noise and unrealistic expectations, you believe in yourself. You believe you have something to say. You believe you are capable of making something real.
Most of all, you believe it matters.
So you take a deep breath. You pull yourself back up. You look toward the summit far away, and put one foot in front of the other.
There may be a million people ahead of you.
But after a while, you realize that being a loser is not nearly as terrible as the world makes it out to be.
Maybe the trials of being the best loser shape you for when you do make it, or maybe you realize that being a loser is actually pretty great because it means you believe in yourself enough to continue on.