All or Nothing

...if we couldn’t be the best, we didn’t want to play the game. ~ The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous (Kindle Location 180).

I have to earn your approval,
to tell you honors I've received
or degrees earned or impress
with recondite words.
I cannot compete with you,
haven't audacity to hold myself out
as your equal, anything near your peer.
I hero-worship you, venerate you
from afar, far down the ladder
of relative merit.
Those others, the ones I can denigrate,
those I can easily see myself to best,
to leave in my dust, to be the masses
looking up... The pitiable, the ignoble,
I can treat with gracious compassion.
But I'm lonely, forlorn here, all alone.
And that's all past, buried in those years
when I had no respect for me, no peace.
I've learned the judgements all were lies.
Now, accepting me — and you —
I stand amid friends, nothing to prove,
just real people to love. Including me.