Do they give out awards for most innovative accolade storage container?

Moving is never fun.  Perhaps that is why Harlan always finds a way to weasel out of most of it most of the time.  During our 9+ years of togetherness, we have shared four different residences in three different states.  Our first cohabitance (yes, I totally just made up that word and can’t believe it doesn’t already exist) was a studio loft apartment in Alfred, NY, where we lived for two years.  Fourteen foot ceilings, huge windows, dead center of Main Street, a shower barely large enough for me to raise my arms… I really loved that apartment.  Next, we packed up and moved 900 miles into a four-plex in Missouri.  Five years later, it was another 900 miles to our cute rent-to-own house in Albuquerque.  Despite our intentions to rent-and-then-own, that house was ultimately not meant to be and we moved a year later when we became first time homeowners (only about 1 mile this time!).

So with all this moving, trekking across the country, cleaning and sorting, packing and unpacking…how did we end up with boxes upon boxes of junk that have continued to travel with us despite the fact that we don’t know what’s in half of them?  Harlan and I both come from families with slight hoarding/packrat tendencies, so we have a lot of difficulty throwing things away.  You just never know when you’ll remember the utility of that vaguely familiar plastic cylindrical doohickey.  Or when you’ll want to relearn the words on those vocabulary index cards from the SAT, or maybe it was the GRE?  When we first got to Albuquerque, I did finally get around to sorting through my personal boxes of papers.  A Craigslist filing cabinet now holds the methodically organized “important” things, thousands of unnecessary receipts (ie. groceries bought 8 years ago) have found a new home in the dumpster, and I laboriously read and sorted through old greeting cards, hanging onto only those that were most meaningful.  But what else did I find in all this old “junk”?  A blue garbage pail.  Literally, a garbage pail, like the one you would put in your kitchen.  And in that garbage pail where all the accolades and awards that I obviously cared so much about that I decided to store them…in a garbage pail.  I found a glass jar full of pins from honor societies, a stash of trophies from gymnastics, and a large Tupperware container full of medals and ribbons from both gymnastics and academics.  There was a plastic bag with award plaques, and envelopes with certificates from college awards.  Heck, there were even college diplomas.

I do not write this because I am bragging about these awards.  Quite the contrary.  I write this because I find it odd that they meant so little to me that they sat in a garbage pail in the back of a closet and were largely forgotten about until very recently.  I had a huge complex growing up (and still do) that I was never good enough.  I worked far harder than I needed to and packed my schedule far fuller than was healthy to do, all because I was just trying to be good enough.  Good enough for what?  I don’t know.  By who’s standards?  Again, I don’t know.  But I was an overachiever and perfectionist, trying so hard to prove my worth.  And here it is, proof of my worth.  A garbage pail full of accomplishments.  A mix of sports, music, academics, and service.  A medal that says Valedictorian that I honestly have no memory of receiving and has never been taken out of the box.  In fact, it was hard to tell if the box had ever even been opened.  A large trophy that says “first place all-around” despite me only remembering how awful I was at gymnastics compared to the other girls in the gym.  How can I not remember standing on the top platform to receive that trophy?  Diplomas- 3 for bachelor’s degrees and 1 for a masters.  Those should be important, shouldn’t they?  A lot of money and time went into those.

So if all I wanted in life was to be told that I was good enough, and receiving an award is a way of being told that you did a good job, then why wasn’t that “enough”?  I guess that wasn’t what I wanted…or needed.  I didn’t need other people’s praise, and I didn’t want something to hang on the wall.  I wanted an internal sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, and unfortunately I don’t know if I ever really achieved that.  Harlan tried to applaud me for these accomplishments and without realizing it I kept coming up with excuses why each award was insignificant.  That first place all-around?  Well, I had been injured so many times and had to continually start over again at lower levels, so I was much older than most girls.  The awards are given by age groupings, and the competitive groups were the younger girls, not the smaller groups of older girls who hadn’t reached the higher levels yet.  And the academic awards?  I had a good memory and was good at taking exams.  It’s not because I was any smarter than anyone else in school.  I just had OCD and knew how to study effectively.

So then Harlan asked, if most of these accomplishments meant so little to me that I barely remembered them, which awards was I proud of?  Well, obviously my running medals, because those never got stashed in the blue garbage pail.  My running medals got hung around the house on random things that served as hooks.  But this is actually a bit curious- With the exception of a 3^rd place medal for a 5K and medals for two duathlons (one for first female finisher and one for first in my age group), none of my medals were “earned”.  They were all basically participation medals.  Mere finisher medals.  They don’t say that I’m fast, they don’t say that I’m the best. Everyone who starts and finishes the race gets the same medal.  They basically say that I was “good enough” to finish, and yet they bring a smile to my face.  How can a finisher medal make me happier than a diploma or a valedictorian medal or a first place all-around trophy?  I really don’t know.

(I would also like to note that Harlan had no idea where any of his academic awards were, either, and he also has a lot of them.  He didn’t even know where his PhD diploma was.  However, he did know where his homebrewing ribbons and medals were, and now they are prominently displayed on a tie rack with my running medals. )

So running accomplishments make me happy.  What else?  I looked at the heap on the floor and could only pick out 3.

One was the Peggy Pastor Award that I won in 5^th grade.  It’s not an academic award; it’s an award for citizenship.  The teachers get together and vote on one 5^th grade student in the whole school to receive that award.  I was so insecure in 5^th grade and knowing that the school community wanted me to have that plaque was really meaningful, enough that I remember that feeling today.  To me, it was a sign that people didn’t just think that I was smart, but that they also liked me, which was worlds more important.

The second one was a little pin that was given to me by my 6^th grade science teacher.  I started to rebel a little bit in 6^th grade, as much as any goodie two-shoe, straight A student could.  I got in trouble quite a bit for talking in class and writing/passing notes, and I remember rudely speaking back to teachers.  I actually got an in-school suspension in 7^th grade, but that’s a different story.  Anyway, I got scolded a lot in science class because I was always writing notes and not paying attention, and one time my teacher caught me in a lie.  He tracked me down in the cafeteria and asked me to look him in the eye and tell him whether or not I had done something.  I looked him straight in the eye…and lied.  We had some rough times, but he still seemed to like me.  I did really well in his class and he knew that I enjoyed science.  As the year progressed, I stopped being so defiant.  Whatever I was hoping to get out of such behaviors obviously wasn’t coming to fruition.  I withdrew, but as a result became more respectful.  At the end of the year, my teacher again tracked me down in the cafeteria.  This time it wasn’t to scold me or catch me in a lie.  It was to give me a small box that contained a little medallion on a silly red and white checkerboard pin.  It was a medal that he had won when he was in school.  He said that they didn’t give out awards in 6^th grade and he couldn’t give me anything official.  So instead he gave me his pin, one that he had worked for and achieved, and for some reason he wanted me to have it.  He said that I had come a long way and he thought that I would accomplish great things.  So he gave me that pin.  That silly pin.  To this day, I treasure that pin more than any other academic award that I have received.

Lastly, there were medals from my 8^th grade year.  Each subject gave out an award- one for math, one for English, one for history, etc.  I won 7 awards that year, yet I only remember what one was for: technology.  At 14 and probably not even 4’8” or 90 pounds, I won the technology award.  I loved tech class, especially woodworking.  Anything that got my hands dirty and used new machines was exhilarating.  I had a jam-packed schedule even then, but I remember trying to find some days during the week that I had an extra 30 minutes or so after school before I had to be at my next engagement.  I would leave my last class and go down to the shop to work on new things with my instructor.  For those 30 minutes, I didn’t have an obligation to fulfill; there was no set outcome or assignment that I had to perfect.  I could create and design and play, and it was fantastic.  I had similar experiences in high school when I would stay after school to work in the ceramic studio, but during that eighth grade year, it was shop class.  My passion and effort were noticed, and I was rewarded with an arbitrary, triangular medal.  A medal that looks the exact same as the other 6 that I won that year, because none of them had any type of engraving or sticker to identify the subject that they represented.  But I don’t need an engraving because that one was meaningful, and I remember.

Maybe what I’ve learned in all this is that it’s ok to have different priorities than we are taught we “should” have.  Even though we may not agree with what others find important, it’s ok to instead take pride in things that are important or dear to us, regardless of what others think.  It’s not about competition, winning awards, or even being noticed.  What we deem as personal successes and accomplishments are what is truly important and what will stay with us.  If we all worried a little less about what we have to do to make others happy and proud, and worried a little more about making ourselves happy and proud, maybe we would all be a little better off and a lot more successful.  Perhaps we need to be less preoccupied with decorating our walls and adorning our trophy cases, and be more focused on decorating our hearts, minds, and the lives of others.  Those are things to brag about, but it seems like the people who truly excel in those areas do the least amount of boasting. Coincidence?  Probably not.