After all, nothing in the outside world has changed as a result of my accumulation of debating accolades. I haven’t contributed to anyone’s understanding of anything, except maybe my own, and that only partially.

There was always a man, somewhere, who could be credited with my achievements: if not my teammate, then my coach, and if not my coach, then one of my previous teammates. So I learned how to thank them. And then smile.

I was nineteen when I started debating competitively, and it’s probably fair to say that most things I did when I was nineteen were motivated by a desperation to be liked. I wasn’t only willing to lose debates: I was willing to tell all my secrets, to lend money when I couldn’t afford to, and to date anyone who showed an interest in me, no matter... See more

‘Anything can be great,’ Fast Eddie says. ‘I don’t care, bricklaying can be great.’ But you don’t lay bricks with the intention of accumulating a record number of points, and you certainly don’t do it to attain some kind of phoney celebrity. For flow to be authentic, it has to be for its own sake. The ego has to fall away. This is not so difficult... See more

The most ambitious debaters go out of their way to absorb information about sexual violence, racial profiling, police brutality: issues many of them will never experience firsthand. I did the same thing. Did it make me more empathetic and self-aware? Or did it just continue to affirm the idea that if I were smart and competitive enough, I could... See more

But I did it. I got everything I set out to get. I was the one delivering the offhanded refutation. It was me sipping water while I waited for the end of the applause. I still occasionally feel an impulse to attribute all my achievements that year to my perfect teammate, or worse, to good luck. But I’m not nineteen anymore; I don’t need to make... See more

In Sorties , Hélène Cixous writes: ‘For woman speaking – even just opening her mouth – in public is something rash, a transgression.’ In a world saturated with the sounds of male authority, there’s always something ‘not quite’ about a woman’s voice in public. I could even hear it in my own.

Coming face to face with the irrelevance of your own strivings demands some kind of response. You can wallow in the pretend celebrity if you want, continue attending competitions every weekend and dutifully appearing in selfies with beaming novices, in the belief that you are actually important. Or you can self-justify in the guise of getting some... See more

For me, the speaking part was easy, something like the experience of particularly quick and effortless typing: you think the words, and then the words appear on the screen, without any real awareness of the intermediary process. You think the concepts, and then the concepts express themselves. You hear yourself constructing syntactically elaborate... See more