LABOR of Love: An Essay on Debate Burnout and Catharsis

Thank you to our opponents…you push us out of our narrow confines.

–Ross K. Smith

Sophia Dal Pra (they/them) is a 2nd-year debater at the University of Kentucky. In addition to being an amateur debater, they are an amateur academic, dramatic coloratura soprano, guitarist, poet, author, and yogi, all out of love.

Wow, has this been a season for me.

If you know me even in the slightest in a debate sense (or in a twitter sense), you may know that I barely had a season due to my partner dropping multiple tournaments last minute for various reasons, culminating in them getting kicked off my squad a week before the District 6 NDT-qualifying tournament. It’s not like I have that printed on a t-shirt or anything, but I am not shy in sharing this information because I am still disappointed that my season was ended abruptly with an emotional, vague snapchat message.

Should I have written that? I mean, it is the truth. Something something Zenger defense.

If you know me a bit better, you may know that my debate skill was the scapegoat they used when justifying why file X wasn’t done or updates ABC were not in the Dropbox – apparently, it’s hard to get motivated to cut more than 3 cards a semester when your partner is just so SO bad. Like next level bad. Like, you can’t even CONCEIVE the levels of “bad” I am at debate. Don’t try, it might hurt your brain.

I knew that my partner felt this way about me from the beginning of our partnership. I don’t want to get into specifics on their end, but on my end, I put on a happy face and kept chugging. My first semester was filled with medical diagnoses, school things, and an NDE to close out the year (that stands for “Near Death Experience”). Even through that crazy stuff, debate felt like it should’ve been on the front burner, so to speak. I mean, if I want to prove that I’m not Bad at Debate™ , then that needs to be my top priority at every waking moment. Other folks have proven themselves, so they get to take time off. I do not get that luxury, as my every move is under scrutiny. Maybe if folks saw my work ethic and my skill in practice, they’d come around and celebrate me along with the rest of the team.

I should’ve known that this effort would be fruitless. Before even debating with me at the beginning of the year, my partner told me they were going to talk to our coach about switching partners. because they wanted to be with a partner who had gone to the TOC in high school. Their opinions of me were formed and finalized before even seeing me debate, all because my high school career was on a circuit with $5 entry fees, with parents in the back, where every tournament was one or two days long, and everywhere reachable by bus.

I sit down to write this after walking to a drinking fountain to dump out a melted, old, untouched Jimmy John’s Diet Coke that Kentucky MW neglected during their quarterfinals finish at CEDA. I’m a bit peeved right now, because I caved and did what I promised myself I wouldn’t do.

A few days ago someone looked at me and said “Hey, you should dump that out.” Referring to the stray, warm Diet Coke.

And I thought to myself, “Ok buddy, you saw it first”, and “Because he told you to do that, you will NEVER touch the foamy sides of that liquid sludge container and move it from its current location.” And right now, I caved and did it. One more little bit of housework to keep the UK Debate Office nice and tidy, for our top competitors to come home to after a long day.

I clean up because I care about this place. It is my home, really. I can confidently say that I’ve spent most of my undergraduate time in this office and probably will by the end of four to five odd years. It’s true that I started debating in college with a minimal knowledge set compared to other competitors and I have never been under any illusions about the work I need to put forward to get as far or farther than others. Local debate does not prepare you for the pace, technicality, and amount of jargon that college NDT-CEDA debate contains, and I’ve worked hard to gain the education that my teammates were fortunate enough to get at their $7,000 camps out of my motivation and love for the activity.

This is fully to toot my own horn. I am tooting it right now. TOOT TOOT.

I deserve to shed my typical humility for a change. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I have more hard work ahead to get where I’m going.

I am in the office five to six days a week. I have never been in here for under three hours. I have spent upwards of fifteen in here. You do the math on that.

It’s been lonely through COVID, though I hear reports that this was once the place to be for Kentucky debaters. Of course, I’m not always doing debate work in here – I do schoolwork, take breaks with video games, and last year, I stored my ukulele under a side table. Just an hour ago I was annotating a poetry book I just finished. What Runs Over by Kayleb Rae Candrilli gets 5 stars from me. The book is a rural trans coming of age story. A major theme throughout the text is how someone actualized their innermost dreams and desires.

This theme, in connection with where I sit as I write this, took me down THE neurodivergent tangent to end all tangents. I have strong emotions surrounding debate and my achievements. I want to be “good” (or “competitive” as my partner phrased it, with I as the antithesis). Everyone wants to have those wins, but my desire to win over these last two years has become toxically linked with the idea that once I start winning debates, I will have proven myself to those that look down on me and treat me as a second-class teammate.

I don’t think that this linkage was intentional on my part, but when others treat you as an outsider because your family deals with disability and poverty and therefore, could not afford big camps and you also live on a debate circuit where you can very well go four years without knowing what the “national circuit” is, you gain an inner desire to prove that if your situation was different, you would be just like them.

I am tired. And through my written self-reflection, I realize that my tiredness has nothing to do with my amount of work. I hyperfixate on debate. There is nothing I could do to overwork myself here. The emotional highs and lows that have been the flame behind my work for so long have been pushed to their limit. In my mind, the goalpost was moving, and the fix was to add more fuel so I could get there.

It turns out that there never was a goalpost. However far I make it, I will never be there or seen as one of them. This is a realization that I only recently started voicing. I denied it previously because it was too painful for me to stomach.

The “fire in [my] belly” is exhausted. When you work for external validation, your work on the thing you love feels almost claustrophobic. When your work isn’t appreciated, the walls close in even further. Top that off with the realization that you will never reach that goal, and you will be patronized for trying.

Seriously, someone told me “Wow, you’re actually trying?”

That was the moment that the walls collapsed. I was sure that that was what being buried alive felt like.

I am a big fan of Disney, Hello Kitty, Peanuts, and Studio Ghibli, so I’ve always been a fan of happy, or at least bittersweet, endings. I crave catharsis.

My motivation and love for debate have started to heal. I have started working for myself slowly, when I want to. I’ve been interjecting other activities into my work sessions, like practicing breath support for my 18th-century Italian arias or reading gay poetry.

I originally thought that I would close this story with the classic “process over product” and “wins aren’t everything” messages, but I think that would make this essay too impersonal and preach-y. I’m writing this for myself, not for you. I don’t need to distill my personal experiences into one of Aesop’s fables to make it easily stomachable. This story does not have a definitive resolution; it’s still in progress. There is no moral to it, or an intended audience even.

Most importantly, this is not for the members of my team who are making an effort to be mindful of the way they treat me.

While it’s appreciated, they do not get a cookie for something that should’ve been the norm, that should’ve started over two years ago. The support they give me is boosting me over a barrier of their creation. They are not the heroes because the fairy tale should not have existed.

They will not free me from the rubble that they left in their wake. What remains is a sinkhole, a giant moat, to keep myself protected from external pressures, validation-seeking, and the pain that is intrinsic to both. The people I allow through are my best friends, my people, and you know who you are. Thank you for keeping me in this wonderful activity, I love all of you deeply.

In a way, I am allowing you through as well. Written here are my thoughts and emotions stripped of frills with some added humor. I only talk that way to the people I’m closest to, so apparently, I consider you a friend.

Now that I think back on the past five hours, I think my goal in writing this essay, subconsciously, was to put into words my emotions around winning, debating, winning debates, and the ways I can separate that from my worth as an intelligent person.

Through a few rounds of editing, I can read this without tears. Even if my catharsis isn’t written for you to read, know that I still feel it, somehow, through letting people back in.