You Are Not Your Score

There’s a little box on my screen that dictates a surprising amount of my mood. It fluctuates up and down, seemingly at random, and I find myself far too invested in its pronouncements. This little box? My chess rating. I’m currently obsesses with online chess, where I find myself getting caught up in my rating, and how well I’m doing against other people on the chess site. That number can feel like a personal judgement, a direct measure of my intelligence - or my worth - on any given day. The very nature of the online chess platform ensures a constant ebb and flow of victory and defeat, as it diligently pairs me with equally matched opponents. Logic dictates I’ll win some and lose some, yet each loss can still sting with disproportionate intensity. But I still find myself getting angry with myself for a particular loss, and sometimes I feel I should just stop trying completely.

This is madness, but it’s a very human kind of madness - of course, there are things I can do about how well I play, but in the end, the world isn’t set up for me to win all the time, and I’m always going to be facing setbacks, and there will be times when it’s a struggle.

And while my current battleground is the 64 squares of a chessboard, I know this feeling resonates far beyond the game. Perhaps for you, that number isn’t a chess rating. Maybe it’s the balance in your bank account, the reading on your bathroom scales, the targets at work, or something else entirely. We’re all human, and we all tend to find ourselves attatching a lot of meaning to these external symbols. Chess is a great example though, because it’s very easy to see that this is an artificial construct. Chess, in its essence, is a game, a set of rules and pieces confined to a board. Its rating system is a purely human invention, a way to quantify skill within this self-contained world. Yet, we allow this abstract number to impact our emotions. We humans manage to do the same about all sorts of things, and we manage to convince ourselves that they’re the most important thing in our world right now, and get ourselves extremely attached to these symbols.

The thing to remember, of course, is that we aren’t those symbols! We are living breathing humans, with many many different fascinating facets. We are so much more than the sum of these external achievements or measurements. Our worth isn’t in the rating, the balance, or the weight; it’s in our thoughts, our actions, our connections, our experiences. By constantly focusing on where we’re not meeting up to these symbolic expectations, we are emphasising our deficiencies. It’s natural to acknowledge areas where we want to improve, and these metrics can be a motivation to do the necessary work, but it’s a problem when we are only doing this.

Instead, we need to set aside space when this isn’t our focus, and be quite rigorous in not allowing the “deficits” to intrude into this space. We must consciously carve out pockets of time and reserves of mental energy where these external evaluations are deliberately set aside, where they are not permitted to intrude. If we’re worried about our weight, and we like to cook, then we should make sure we set aside time to cook what we want, and then enjoy eating it. If we’re under pressure at work, we find ways to carve out time when that isn’t our focus, but instead we’re enjoying something else - it doesn’t have to be super-special walks in nature with sunsets, it could just be watching our favourite soaps. Whatever it is, it’s not about the deficit.

So find ways to let go of our quest for self-improvement. Embrace the joy in the process, in the doing, rather than solely fixating on the outcome or the metric. You are not your score. You are your thoughts and your actions. Hold onto that.