And The Award For Most Conflicted About Awards Goes To…

Who really benefits from awards? Besides the people who created them to sell an idea that productivity is the end goal in life? What is the benefit besides the grants that are approved because of a title, and the way that shiny shades of metal open doors and attract cameras? Which, for the record, only happens because we live within an award-fixated culture that thrives off judgement and comparison and being ’the best’... so again… who really benefits from awards?

The honest answer is that I don’t fully know (none of us do).

What I do know is that I keep entering them. Keep waiting for results. Keep feeling, either way, like something has been confirmed or denied about me that I didn’t actually want an answer to.

I hate awards. I also want them desperately. Just like every other person in this world. Just like every other person in advocacy who comes from a place of knowing what it feels like to be broken, to not feel enough. I am constantly searching for some form of validation that what I do is good, that it is making a change, that I am enough. And having an award, something tangible, gives me that proof. Or something that looks enough like proof that I keep reaching for it.

I hate that. Because what it communicates in its absence, which is 99.999% of the time, is that the work isn’t coming to something. That our work isn’t coming to something. And that the people who are silently fighting, who are surviving every single day, whose survival is so much more deserving of recognition than any campaign I have ever run with resources behind me and a team around me… those people are not the ones being celebrated. We are. And I find that very difficult to sit with.

I am not writing this to position myself above the wanting. I want awards too. I think most people in this sector do, even the ones who say otherwise. When you come from a place of having felt broken, of having spent years not feeling like enough, of course you reach for anything that might finally, concretely, prove the opposite. An award is tangible. It has your name on it. Someone decided formally that what you did was worth acknowledging. Of course that means something. Of course it becomes something close to addictive.

The alternative is a stable, unconditional sense of your own worth, untethered from external confirmation. It is one of the hardest things a human being can do. And we are not exactly surrounded by systems that make it easier.

But I hate what awards have done to me specifically. They have created something in me that I didn’t consent to. A need. A grip. A drug I find myself in search of.

If I win, I feel the weight of a reputation I now have to uphold. Eyes on me. Expectations forming. The award becomes a baseline rather than an endpoint, and everything that follows is quietly shadowed by whether it will be enough to sustain what winning implied about me.

If I don’t win, I feel like my work has gone unrecognised. Like there are people more deserving. Like everything might have been a mistake.

There really is no winning, even when you win.

I try every single day to remind myself that it is about community. That the purpose is not individual (or even collective) recognition. And every day I feel something close to vengeance towards myself for wanting that recognition anyway. For wanting reassurance through something as tokenistic, as ultimately irrelevant, as an award. I try so hard. And I hate, genuinely hate, that they make me prioritise proving myself over being present. Over being in the moment. Over the actual work and the actual people the work is for.

What I hate most structurally is that awards commodify our community. They take our connections, our purpose, our collective and turn them into something competitive rather than collaborative. They make people who are working toward the same thing into rivals. They frame us as being in competition, vying for a trophy of accomplishment, when in reality all that does is reinforce the notion that worth comes from what you produce. From what you give to others while taking from yourself. From how you are graded against the people standing next to you.

That is the opposite of what most of us believe. It is the opposite of what brought most of us here.

The people who most deserve to be told they are enough are not the ones with the platforms and the campaigns. They are the ones surviving inside the very systems we are trying to change. Getting out of bed on days when that is the most courageous thing anyone could ask of them. Their names do not appear on shortlists. Their ‘resilience’ (man, I hate that word) is not the subject of gala dinner speeches. And the longer I stay in this sector, the more that particular fact sits in me like something unresolved.

Awards also only ever serve the feeling of not being enough. Because even when you get one, the ‘not-enoughness’ doesn’t go away. It just finds a new threshold.

Becoming accustomed to them creates the very drug you are then in endless search of. And I am aware, with some grief, of what that has cost me. Of how much (mainly in my past, but I still catch myself to this day) of my presence, my attention, my actual being here has been quietly redirected into proving myself to a system that will never fully see me. That was never designed to.

I am sorry that the world is this way. I am sorry that so many people who came into this work because they knew what it felt like to not be enough are being held in exactly that feeling, dressed up in the language of celebration and recognition and honouring the community.

I don’t have a resolution to offer. I am still in the grip of it, same as everyone. I just think it is worth saying that out loud, plainly, without making it into a lesson.

We built the thing that is hurting us. Or we inherited it, and kept building.

So in the meantime, whilst I still grapple to free myself from the clutches of accomplishment, I want EACH. AND. EVERY. ONE. OF. YOU. to know that you get an award from me. One that is not tangible, that’s not read aloud at a fancy event or that is framed in a beautiful golden frame, but one that I hope stays etched into your hearts forever.

With love,

Rachael.