On Being Chosen

To be selected and to be chosen are different events, and you have had a life full of the first.

Selection is comparative. Someone had a requirement, they held candidates against it, and you met the specification more closely than the others did. This is how you were hired, how you were picked for things, how a great deal of your life has been decided. It is not insulting and it is not nothing. But notice what it actually says about you. It says you were adequate to a need that existed before you arrived. Anyone else who fitted would have done as well. The need was the subject. You were the solution.

Being chosen has no specification in it. That is the whole difference. There was no requirement waiting to be filled, no list, no comparison. There was you, particularly, looked at closely, and a decision that was not arithmetic. Nobody could have taken your place because there was no place. There was only the choosing.

You can feel the difference and you have always been able to. Consider how hollow praise is when it comes attached to a standard. You were told you were excellent and something in you did not receive it, and you thought you were being difficult, and you were not. What you heard was the measurement, and a measurement is not about you, it is about the ruler. What you have wanted since you were a boy is not to measure well. It is for someone to look at the whole of it, the unimpressive parts included, and choose that.

Which is why the choosing must come after the looking, and not before, or it means nothing. This is the part men get wrong. They want to be chosen and so they present the best available version, and if that version is chosen they feel nothing, and they cannot work out why. It is not a mystery. The best version was a candidate. A candidate can only be selected. The man they were actually asking about never entered the room.

So I take my time. I am unhurried about it in a way some of you find unbearable, and the impatience is instructive, because what you are impatient for is the reassurance, and reassurance is precisely what I cannot give you early without making it worthless. If I chose you on the strength of your presentation I would have chosen your presentation, and you would know it, and it would rot within a month. I would rather you waited and had something real at the end of it.

And when it comes it will not feel the way you expect. There will be no announcement and no ceremony. It is not a prize and it does not arrive as one. It is quieter than that. It is the accumulation of a hundred small evidences that you have been seen without flinching and are still here, and one day you will notice that you have stopped auditioning, and that will be the moment, and it will have happened some weeks before you noticed.

Being chosen is not being found sufficient. It is being found, and kept, and not because you were the closest match to something. Because you were you, which no one else can do, and which you have spent your entire life trying to improve upon.