This story reminded me of childhood moments when, upon discovering our announced defeat in a game, we feel like shuffling all the pieces.Art: Kiko
Published 05/05/2024 09:00
It was Monday morning and I had already started my conversation with my friend Macarrão. The dialogue took place via telephone call, from my cell phone to his landline number — who still has the relic of a telephone at home? On the other side of the line, he exuded his happiness at the previous day’s victory for Botafogo, his favorite team, over Flamengo. In fact, for him, winning this classic is like winning a separate championship. “I’ve woken up, had coffee, watched all the sports programs and in a little while I’m going to go out to buy lunch dressed in the Botafogo shirt. In fact, today is the 29th, and there’s fortune gnocchi. Then I’ll go back to watch the other sports programs “.
Alvinegro’s victory changes his schedule. If Glorioso doesn’t win, he doesn’t tune in to any channel where he can hear commentary about the defeat. I understand it as a deal he makes with himself: his team can lose and he can even admit that it was deserved, but no one else has the right to say anything about it. A setback from the Lone Star club practically ends his week.
This story reminded me of childhood moments when, upon discovering our announced defeat in a game, we feel like shuffling all the pieces. Whether board, dice or other items. It’s as if we wanted to put an end to the traces that the other got the better of us. We tend to interrupt the joke that insists on telling us that we were not the winners.
Today, looking in the rearview mirror of my life, I suspect that I was terrified of competing. In any game like hide-and-seek, I wanted to be café au lait forever. In other words, I participated, but I feared the feeling of being “discovered” in these games. So the rules didn’t apply to me. I would never lose, but I would never win either.
As an adult, I even tried to be as neutral as possible in many years of my life, perhaps reliving the role of childhood. That way, I would pass through the other person’s eyes unharmed. Interestingly, when I unlocked the barrier of showing myself to the world and started connecting with people who were already part of my daily life, a professional colleague commented that until then she had no image formed about me. Neither for good nor for bad. Maybe I was in fact café au lait.
But it was precisely as an adult that life imposed the biggest setbacks, difficulties, obstacles on me… I could no longer say that it wasn’t worth it to me. Several times, I wanted to scream: “I don’t want to play anymore. I want to go back to my childhood version, with everything it represented.” But then I discovered that you can’t mix up the pieces of reality and throw them into the air.
Interestingly, today I look at social media and see that we still want to compete to see who shows the best happiness, the most harmonious family, the most devoted love, the most incredible trip, the most balanced life… We try to deceive ourselves in the image that we can handle everything. It’s just “want, can and get”, they say.
As we are all also made of defeats, at these times, I try to give up this game of make-believe. And then, for a different reason, I remember my friend Macarrão: I change the tune, switching to another profile or stopping watching the social network at that moment. After all, it can be a small victory to change the channel of what is not good for us.
