Crystal, Mega L Moment
Debate is a loser’s activity
Debate is a loser’s activity. I don’t mean that in an insulting way.
In a perfectly balanced British Parliamentary round, there’s a 75% chance of losing. Taking anything other than a first is a loss. Though seconds may hurt less than fourths, someone else is still better than you.
That’s just one round. Let’s look at a tournament as a whole.
There are 128 teams at the annual Hart House Debate Tournament, arguably the most competitive Canadian high school tournament. Eight teams break to semifinals, so if all things are equal, you get a nice 6.25% chance of getting some recognition.
But semifinals obviously isn’t enough. To get any real clout, you need to win a tournament. Your margins diminish: 0.78% chance.
This is just through spinning a random, nerdy, theoretical wheel of fortune. In reality, the circuit is competitively stratified. Some debaters train and casefile for hours in order to improve their chances of winning. Most debaters end up quitting.
The likelihood of winning a tournament is far closer to 0% than 0.78%. There’s a small group of familiar faces you’ll see in the finals of every high school debate championship, and it’s not likely you’ll be one of them unless you’re willing to spend thousands of dollars on multiple coaching institutions and sacrifice hundreds of hours practicing. And that requires a particular economic status and particular masochistic tendencies.
Oh, you weren’t on the hidden tournament mailing list, and weren’t able to fill the reg form within 10 seconds of its release? Sucks to suck. You can lose before you even have the chance to compete.
So after debating for nearly a third of my life, and losing for most of it, I thought I was already intimately familiar with failure. I’d been rejected from Team Canada tryouts the year before. I’d tried quitting, taking breaks and coming back worse better.
I was also a massively overconfident idiot. Turns out, that rejection hurts more when it’s the final one.
The pressure cooker of high level debate is isolating– that level of specialization creates an involuntary social circle where there are only a few people who can really relate to what you’re going through.
Tryouts is a uniquely lonely season. Before March, there’s a sense of camaraderie in the circuit. You tease each other for spending yet another weekend stuck inside debating, you hype each other up while waiting for the finals call. But the Team Canada application process makes it clear: your friends are your direct competition.
It’s a zero-sum game. There are limited spots available; if you get in, they don’t, and vice versa. Long-time debate partners often break up. It’s a painful and drama-filled season.
If you’re lucky, you’ll have connections to seniors and university debaters that can provide advice. If not, you go through the process alone.
There are about four stages to applying, depending on where you’re from. Regardless of what steps you take, the application process requires you to do one thing: believe wholeheartedly that you deserve to be on the team. It takes a lot of audacity. You have to look at the garbage dump inside you, and tell yourself that it is worth representing Canada.
Even if you feel like you’re lying, after a while, you start buying into what you write. I could do this, you think. I could be the best. And so you word vomit your heart out onto the page, edit rigorously so your paragraphs are less vomit-like but still “come from within”, and then pray that Nicole Ratti thinks it’s enough.
Hi, my name is Crystal Zhang. I’m affable, analytical, and competitive. I’m able to use all these adjectives without consulting a thesaurus. Here are my awards. Now please let me on the team or I’ll do unspeakable things to myself.
So, after all this mental struggle, what happens when the faceless authorities behind the board decide that your application isn’t good enough? Let’s say it clearly: you aren’t good enough.
It was all quite anticlimactic. A debate friend that had also been rejected messaged me “Crystal, mega L moment” on Discord before I even saw the email.
From Josh Judah: National Team Alternate Tryout — April 2nd and 3rd
Below was a list of 24 names that had made the tryout. I scanned that list, once, twice, three times in disbelief. Crystal Zhang was decidedly not one of the names listed. Maybe it was arrogant to presume I would get a spot after making day two last year, but you need that ego to survive in a competitive activity. You have to believe you deserve these insane opportunities. Alas, the Canadian Student Debating Federation giveth, the Canadian Student Debating Federation taketh away.
Josh Judah had CC’d us all, with the names of everyone that had been cut openly visible. Public humiliation, it seems, is a very effective tool in making someone feel like shit.
Mega L moment indeed.
I had expected a more dramatic reaction from myself. Perhaps I should’ve fallen to my knees and sobbed about the injustice of it all, cursing the decision panel and the 24 people that’d made it through for the disintegration of my Teenage Dreams. Instead, I just felt empty.
I think I liked it that way. Apathy was infinitely preferable to desolation. It made me feel strong, like I was above caring about Team Canada, above sadness completely.
(Don’t talk to me about toxic masculinity. I’ll bite you.)
This lasted all of an hour before I texted a friend about getting cut. Her kindness was ruinous; I immediately began crying after she said I should’ve made it through to the next stage.
Okay, maybe I did care about Team Canada. Maybe I did care a lot. Maybe I wanted the opportunity to compete internationally more than I had wanted anything else in my life.
Shame and jealousy struck. I started comparing myself to everyone that made it through. What did they have that I didn’t? I didn’t even make the alt. tryout this time. How did I become worse than myself a year ago?
There were two choices for me now. I could set out on a warpath to beat every Team Canada debater head to head and prove my merit as a speaker, or I could forget about debating forever. Both options are driven by self-hatred and spite of course. They’re well-worn paths, trod by every other debater that gets fucked by the CSDF.
I also could just go touch some grass.
In an extension of my desire to touch some grass and distract myself from debate, I went skiing a few days after I got my rejection email.
I fell backwards on a hill, and hit my head hard enough to have nausea and severe headaches for a month. A concussion sounds far nicer than a traumatic brain injury. My doctor prescribed two weeks of reduced screen time, schoolwork, and physical activity. Days of idle time stretched ahead.
I sat still and tried to recover. I listened to hours of podcasts on end. I painted my nails teal, probably causing more brain damage with the nail polish fumes. I tried to avoid thinking about debate.
I ended up thinking about debate.
It all came back to that one question, was I good enough?
Over the past months, I had tunnel-visioned myself into believing that making Team Canada was the only thing that mattered. It was a myopic obsession. I did debate to make TC, to be great, to prove I was good, to feel okay.
Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In setting my metric for evaluation of a person as TC, I forgot what debate meant to me. I chased wins for the feeling of relief it gave me, validation that I was still a Good Debater with Potential and Awards to put on my application and not a washed senior.
Here’s the thing: winning a round doesn’t teach you anything. If anything, all it does is provide a false sense of comfort. It’s losing that makes you evaluate where you can improve. Losing reminds you that you can always evolve further, beyond where you thought the original boundary of your potential lay. It creates ambition terrifying in its enormity.
Getting rejected from TC removed any justification I once had for debating so intensely, and the concussion provided a helpful medical reason to stop debating for the sake of “avoiding strenuous mental activities.” There was no more pressure to improve.
For all logic, I probably should’ve quit. But I still felt that itch to debate, practice speech drills and listen to outrounds on YouTube. The only reason I had to keep debating is that I enjoyed doing it.
And I mean, I really do. There’s a certain beauty in constructing complex analysis under time pressure and trading arguments with people you’ve never spoken to before, learning more about yourself and your capabilities with each round. I could do it forever.
Your reputation in the debating circuit matters. There’s a clear hierarchical ranking in debate. Members of Team Canada at the top, inexperienced novices at the bottom, myself somewhere in between.
It’s how you get invited to high quality practice spars, partnerships with good debaters, insider knowledge on speaker scores, etcetera. In this specific level of the Canadian circuit, debate is extremely individual. You don’t play on a team of people, or represent a school. You represent yourself, and nobody else. So you can’t do this forever really. There are limitations to the tournaments you can attend, the returns you receive from debate.
My unofficial standing took a nosedive after I missed tryouts and stopped going to tournaments as result of my injury. Suddenly, there were group chats where rounds were organized without me, and information I wasn’t privy to. In high school terms: I wasn’t relevant.
It feels insipid and stupid to care about reputation, but let me indulge myself in these insipid and stupid jealousies.
I gave my first debate speech in nearly two months on the same week as the national tryout. I wish I could tell you it was a great performance. It was quite shit. While others I was once on par with were delivering the best speeches of their debate careers, I was relearning how to create illustrations after being ill for weeks.
I can talk about effort all I want, but it doesn’t change the fact that I now stutter through my speeches. I’ve done worse than plateau–I’ve regressed. Memories of stylistically impressive speeches don’t matter when I currently struggle to fulfill the basics I once mastered.
Physical injuries are visible. When a soccer player takes a break due to a sprained ankle, it’s obvious and understandable. The narrative isn’t that they’re washed and should quit, the narrative is much more hopeful- they’ll get well soon, they’ll come back with a vengeance. There are clear goals in recovery, and the people around them are active in their support.
Internal head injuries are unseen, nevermind mental illnesses. Again– it’s all in my head. I should be better than this. I shouldn’t let it hold me back. It’s not real.
I told very few people about being injured, and I refused to ask for accomodations from my teachers. It abstracized being ill, as if pretending it didn’t exist meant that it would go away faster. As if relying on myself, and only myself, made me better in the eyes of other debaters.
This individualized self-flagellation was an operation doomed to fail from the beginning. At its core, debate is a team activity. You lean on your partner when they know the motion better, you send them refutation through the Zoom chat box when you know they’re busy building up the case. You build intensely close relationships with people in the community through these shared experiences, and as you get a bit older and a bit more experienced, you pass down knowledge to juniors that have just began something amazing.
Your reputation in debate isn’t solely contingent on your performance, but rather your personhood and what you’ve contributed to the circuit. I forgot this positive part entirely. More actively, I pushed it down as a means to continue punishing myself for failing to make TC.
There isn’t any room for self deprecation in debating. Outside this small bubble of a couple thousand people, nobody gives a fuck about success in competitive debate. In the end, it’s all about you and your drive. The raw, unabashed desire to challenge yourself that makes you sign up for tournaments in time zones across the world because you won’t be able to look yourself in the eye if you don’t at least try.
I had to literally get some sense knocked into me to realize that it didn’t matter where I ended up. What mattered was that I did it. Nobody forced me to keep practicing speeches, nobody asked me to apply to TC again after being rejected that first year. I was the one that put the work in, and that was good enough.
I debate because I love it. Simple as that.
Thank you Brent Schmidt for being my coach and everything that entails. Thank you Dharini and Sydney for helping edit my initial drafts. Thank you for reading this.