When I was ten, I lost the spelling bee to a kid named Jeremy, who once stapled his own finger to a vocabulary worksheet. He wasn’t trying to make a point, he just had questionable hand-eye coordination and a deeply flawed relationship with office supplies.
Still, he nailed “chrysanthemum” like it was his cousin’s name, and I stood there, sweaty-palmed and baffled, trying to remember if the “h” came before the “s” or after the part where your soul starts to give up.
My mother, a woman who believed in sportsmanship but also in holding grudges, told me to congratulate him. I did, but with the hesitant enthusiasm of someone hugging the person who just beat them at Monopoly by buying every railroad and morally bankrupting their childhood.
“It’s not about being the same,” my dad said that night, scooping ice cream as if he were applying for an internship in dairy sculpture. “Some kids are fast, some are smart, and some just have weird spelling superpowers.”
He wasn’t wrong. I knew kids who could do long division in their heads and others who still tried to eat paste like it might eventually evolve into pudding. And there was always someone like Allison, who could speak French, do a cartwheel, and recite all the presidents in order without once looking smug about it. She was basically a walking résumé with bangs.
But that’s life, isn’t it? People don’t start in the same place, and no amount of matching backpacks or standardized testing will make it so. Some of us begin the race halfway down the track wearing custom sneakers. Others are still tying their shoes when the starting pistol fires. Expecting everyone to finish at the same time is absurd. But expecting the track to be even? That’s not too much to ask.
Fairness, though, is a slippery concept. It’s like shampoo instructions; clear in theory, impossible in practice. In grade school, fairness meant everyone got the same number of cookies, even if someone hoarded theirs like a squirrel and others ate theirs immediately and cried. As adults, fairness becomes more complicated. You pay your taxes and someone else buys a third boat. You follow the rules and still get stuck behind a guy at the DMV who is trying to register a plow mule.
I used to teach writing workshops at a community center where the coffee tasted like a dare and the thermostat was set to “cryogenic chamber.” One student, Carmen, worked two jobs, took care of her niece, and still turned in short stories so raw and beautiful I once nearly choked on a breath mint. Another student, Trevor, had been to four writing retreats and owned a laptop that weighed less than a sandwich. His stories were mostly about sentient throw pillows discovering their truth through interpretive dance.
Guess who got published first?
Not Carmen.
That’s not because Trevor was better. It’s because the system favors those who have time to finesse their cover letters and people who can afford to intern for free and say things like “I just feel like the narrative arc is too linear” without irony. The game isn’t rigged, exactly. It’s just tilted, like a restaurant table that keeps wobbling no matter how many napkins you stuff under the leg.
It’s tempting to say “work hard and you’ll make it,” but that’s not a promise, it’s just a slogan. Talent is uneven. Life is unfair. But systems? Systems we can fix. Or at least we can try. We can make sure Carmen doesn’t have to choose between groceries and Wi-Fi. We can ensure that schools in one zip code don’t look like palaces while others feel like warehouses with motivational posters.
What we shouldn’t do is try to iron everyone into the same shape. That’s not fairness; that’s flattening. Some people are tall. Some people can sing. Some people can parallel park without starting a blood feud with the people waiting behind them. And that’s fine. We shouldn’t be afraid of difference. We just shouldn’t mistake it for superiority.
Jeremy grew up to be a civil engineer. He once sent me a Christmas card with a photo of him and his dog wearing matching flannel pajamas. I stared at it for twenty minutes trying to figure out how someone gets that kind of peace in their life. But the thing is, he earned it. Not because of (or in spite of) the place where he started in life, but because he worked hard within a system that, for once, didn’t trip him up too much along the way.
That’s all we’re asking for, really. Not sameness. Just a fair shot. Not a shortcut to the finish line. Just the chance to run without someone moving the goalposts mid-race. Level the playing field. Let the players be as uneven, weird, gifted, clumsy, and oddly brilliant as they want to be.
We’re not all going to end up in the same place. We won’t all get rich or become brain surgeons or own vacation homes with towel warmers and more rooms than is morally acceptable. And that’s okay. No one expects us to live identical lives. But the playing field? That should be the same for everyone. For too long, it’s been tilted; sometimes subtly, sometimes like a carnival ride designed by someone with a vendetta or a sadistic streak.
Maybe it’s time we stop pretending the slope is natural. Maybe it’s time we start using fair weights and measures and level things out. Not to make us all the same, but to finally give everyone a fair shot at being exactly who they are and at contributing whatever it is that they have to offer.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers friends.