Compete in a chess tournament.

“When play began I could feel my heart pounding! I did not want to mess up in the opening moves! My first few moves of the first game of my first tournament. What a rush. This first opponent took a long time to make his moves. Usually the first 3-4 moves do not require much thought and are made within 15 seconds. But he was taking at least a minute per move and I followed suit. 45 minutes seemed like it would be a long time because that's 90 minutes total (more if you add 15 seconds for the fast moves), and usually my chess games with Greg lasted an hour or less. I was extremely careful with how I played. I thought about every move very carefully, tried to plan my attack, and tried to understand what he was planning against me. He was solid and he made no mistakes that I could exploit. At one point, I had about 8 minutes more time than he did (28 minutes vs. 20 minutes) and I figured if I played a steady thoughtful game, I would win on time.”

“Still, the next morning I was nervous. Very nervous. My stomach had migrated to my throat. This had something to do with the fact that I had carefully avoided competition for more than a decade, having finally internalized the message, which I had been receiving explicitly and implicitly since I was a little girl, that I was too competitive. It also had something to do with the fact that the waiting room at the Boylston Chess Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was filled with children. Chess is strategy; of course it is war, but it is also a children’s game. The history of chess is the history of prodigies, of tiny winners with dangling feet, of adolescent grandmasters. I knew this, everybody knows this; still, it was something else to walk into a room, expecting something as quiet and serious as a chess tournament, and to find yourself at recess. The tables were covered in bags of chips, giant containers of animal crackers.”