The Most Uninspiring Debate Essay You’ll Ever Read
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(The title is an anti-clickbait clickbait title, kind of like how anti-jokes are really just jokes using reverse psychology to squeeze validation out of the listener.)
More often than not, I feel like I’ve faked my way through debate. This may be the furthest thing from a unique debate experience one can have (and definitely has been written about dozens of times), but after musing on my impostor syndrome for a year since my high school career ended, I’ve realized that it doesn’t ever go away. While I’ve thought about my time in debate a lot (I wrote every college application essay — the pinnacle of prolific personal essay writing — about debate), I’ve recently come to realize how uneventful and unspecial it was: how each moment of sadness, joy, catharsis, anger, and frustration is something I share with many other people in the debate community. I’m also writing this in one draft without stopping (something I’ll likely regret later), so here’s a warning that I’ll inevitably wander, pontificate, and repeat myself (and, of course, overuse parentheses).
This essay will start as most other writings of this format go: by laboriously recounting the details of my debate career. For the most part, my debate experience replaced my high school experience, meaning a lot of traditional growing-up narratives — bullying, self-consciousness, self-discovery, mental health issues, friendship drama, relationship drama — were filtered through the lens of debate. But, I won’t get too much into what my speech and debate team was like or about any individual interpersonal relationships in debate I’ve had—mostly because they aren’t that relevant to my point and because this will then be way too long.
I debated for a Bay Area private school that had a large speech and debate program but — when I was joining — had little to no support for circuit debate. The spring of my freshman year, I developed a morbid fascination for circuit LD (mostly stemming from my frequent visits to the debate Reddit). I didn’t have any circuit debate upperclassmen I could talk to — much less connections to other people on the national circuit. So, I decided to go to debate camp (again, recommended by r/Debate).
This gave me my first brush with impostor syndrome: I spent a week feeling utterly lost (not only did I not know who Deleuze was, my inability to spell his name meant I couldn’t even google him). Again, not a unique experience — I was one of thousands of novices trying to grasp the monster that is circuit debate. Unsurprisingly, I developed a shallow, rudimentary understanding of complex debate concepts, a love for cringey debate jokes (e.g. saying the word “perm” in everyday conversation and awkwardly laughing to myself), and a couple of new debate friendships. Armed with what I thought was a massive debate growth spurt, I entered my sophomore year (to showcase the extent to which I overestimated my own ability, a journal entry from the camp tournament where I went 1–5 reads “My NC in this debate was absolute fire”).
My sophomore year was relatively uneventful, mostly punctuated by 3–3 records and hasty attempts at “teaching” a new crop of novices the couple of things I knew about debate. I often refer to this as me trying to “grow a program”, but — in retrospect — it feels inappropriate to label this haphazard struggle as anything akin to growth or program-building.
I went back to camp after sophomore year, however, and experienced what I still remember to be the worst experience with impostor syndrome, ever. By some luck of the draw, I’d been placed in the top lab: I’d be working with and debating against some of the top debaters in the country (it feels impersonal saying that now — a lot of these people are my friends, so if you’re reading this, you are much more to me than a “top debater” and I care for you deeply as people). I am unsure how to emphasize the extent to which I was bad at debate. I lacked a solid foundation in basic debate concepts but had just enough confidence to think I knew a little bit of everything (to visualize, imagine a sixth grader learning pre-algebra trying to solve multivariable calculus problems). I struggled through each assignment and drill, a notable memory being a “responding to Kant” exercise I had to do in front of a decorated lab leader while not knowing a single thing about Kant. I am sincerely grateful to everyone who had to watch me struggle through those two weeks of debate camp: I can’t imagine it was anything less than grating, and the little bits of validation (especially from my lab leaders/mentor) were instrumental to me staying in debate.
What little ego I had developed during my sophomore year evaporated. I felt like I was wasting people’s times by being in debate — as if the more successful debaters I was interacting with were “too good” to talk to me, make eye contact with me, work with me, and hang out with me. All of this, however, I hid beneath a carefree veneer as I brushed off bad performance after bad performance. I wasn’t that unhappy, either: I made friends, reconnected with people I’d met the year before, and felt myself tangibly improving. I just couldn’t shake off the feeling that debate wasn’t for me — an unskilled impostor who would never be ready to face the ginormous world of circuit debate.
Despite my turmoil, my junior year did show a little bit of growth in all directions: I had more debate friends, performed marginally better at tournaments, and developed a better intuition for how to teach debate to my novices. But, emphasis on little. I still lacked confidence and believed most (if not all) victories were borne entirely out of luck — not that either of those two things stopped me from being arrogant at times.
What’s more notable about my junior year is that I really started to obsess over debate. I turned debate into my entire personality (not that it wasn’t before, but in a way that became almost inescapable): relying more on online debate friends than my high school classmates, talking constantly about debate, watching almost every recorded LD round on Youtube, stalking Tab records that weren’t mine, and worst of all, developing opinions on the careers and lives of people who I did not know. It wasn’t that I was that removed from “good debaters” — I was friends with a few — but my knowledge of those few made me entitled to knowledge of all. I began to idolize.
I’ll briefly pause from my narrative to make a point: this is one of the worst things I ever did in debate but simultaneously one of the most common habits I’ve noticed in debaters. It happens everywhere: cliques at tournaments, social media, groupchats, debate Discords, meme groups, and even in casual, debate-related conversation. Idolization takes its toll on both the idolizer and the idolized. For the idolizer, it sets up a ridiculously perfect picture of what a good debater looks like that you inevitably compare yourself against, thus making yourself feel as if you’re never going to be good enough. For the idolized, it can be dehumanizing: you can’t really celebrate your wins or mourn your losses in peace, and the expectations can be crushing — especially when you fall short. I am certain there are many who were idolized to a greater extent than I was, but what little experience I have with the debate community’s love of gossip is deeply negative (even when the things being said about me were positive).
The other consequence of idolizing — one that affected me more than what I listed above — is the production of an artificial hierarchy between debaters defined by “skill”. As I mentioned earlier, I felt — at times — that I didn’t “deserve” to speak to debaters on a “higher tier” than myself. How I defined those tiers was (and still is) impossibly arbitrary, given that there is nothing even close to an objective ranking of “good debaters” (and even the best debaters can name upwards of ten other people they think are better than themselves). The flip side of this, then, was the tendency to ignore or be disrespectful to people I thought weren’t as good as me: being extra-upset about losses to not-as-famous debaters, labeling certain people “randos”, and laughing with my teammates about “bad arguments” that had been read against me. Nothing overt, of course, but equally — if not more — insidious habits that I continue to see in an unfortunately large quantity of debaters of all skill levels.
I went back to camp before my senior year with a slightly more accurate view of my debate skill (my ego had basically middled out to equilibrium) and a more concentrated plan for how I thought I’d improve at debate. I’ll admit that this experience (and everything following it) is less than two years old, which means I have a harder time trying to objectively reflect on it. Nonetheless, I met more friends my third time at debate camp (something I’m incredibly grateful I to have experienced three years in a row) and got much better at debate. I felt the same impostor syndrome I had the summer and season before, but in bursts—not as a general ennui. This summer, however, is most memorable because of how quickly and negatively my opinion of the debate community changed.
I don’t think my nihilism towards the “debate community” came from anything specific: it’s likely a mix of me (personally) growing up, being a more frequent user of debate-related social media websites, and meeting more people (and thus hearing more stories) in debate. But this summer made me realize how messed up a lot of people and institutions in debate are. I will spare the reader from most of these details (for privacy reasons and to avoid redundancy, as I assume a lot of people know at least a couple of stories about how bad debate can be), but I really felt like I was being bombarded with stories of how debate was both unsafe and toxic for the vast majority of (mostly minority) debaters. I quickly cast off the idolization I had previous held — I didn’t really know who in debate I could trust anymore and developed a deep distaste for anyone who correlated good debating with being a good person (as I noted in the beginning of this essay, this is genuinely the farthest from a hot take about debate you can get, but an important moment for me nonetheless).
I approached senior year with a mix of personal optimism and general pessimism. I recognized that I was getting better as a debater, but simultaneously felt tired out by debate. I was lucky (and privileged) enough to have a successful senior year: the kind that achieved the debate milestones I’d set for my career when I was an overconfident sophomore. I don’t think rehashing any of those moments is important, however; the only thing that really changed for me is that, once again, my love for debate-the-activity was starting to blur together with how I felt about debate-the-community. I began to unwaveringly obsess over debate once again, savoring how “elite debate friend groups” (scare quotes, again, because I know very few of the people I was friends with senior year would describe these friend groups as that) were talking to me, recognizing me, and including me. I knew that, in a few cases, my inclusion was conditioned on my success (even if the people in those friend groups didn’t really think about it in that way), but it didn’t bother me — mostly because I assumed I’d ride that high forever.
I can count on one hand the number of really significant senior year memories I had that weren’t tied to debate. I had tightly bound every inch of my being to my debate friends, relationships, and experiences (again, I have a lot of thoughts about the first two things listed here, how they affected me, etc, but it feels somewhat irrelevant to the point I’m trying to make) (also, T-point, given that I’m almost 2000 words in but don’t have a main argument yet). I’ll also note here that my senior year is, for the most part, the year I remember myself to have been the happiest; though it would be boring to any reader to recount every single feel-good moment I had in debate my senior year, I would be remiss if I did not mention it at all (and would make my time in debate sound a lot more negative than it really was).
When debate went online, I grew more desperate to try and squeeze happiness and fulfillment out of it. I spent the first two months after lockdown tabbing and judging at student-led online tournaments (I self-taught myself how to run tournaments on Tabroom for fun), writing and re-writing a ridiculously verbose goodbye debate post, selling debate stickers online, and even organizing practice rounds (T-practice, given that I had decided not to go to eTOC) with my friends. It was a sludge of nostalgia, desperation, and obsession that cemented my overreliance on debate; I routinely joked that COVID-19 wasn’t actually affecting me, since debate meant most of my friendships were online anyways. As the summer approached, I swallowed my disappointment about debate camp being online and grew excited for my first time officially teaching debate.
I loved it. I had found what I believed (and honestly still believe) to be my biggest passion. I cherished being able to contribute to the growth of young members of the debate community. My passion for teaching debate is probably the thing that binds me most to the activity now (since much of my senior-year obsession has faded away) and I have developed an even deeper appreciation for educators in the debate community. It was the students I worked with last summer that kept me going during one of the most personally difficult summers of my life. Even while my disillusionment towards the debate community worsened (even more than it had the previous summer), my love for debate as an activity persisted. Towards the end of that summer, I decided that I’d coach LD at my old high school for the upcoming season. While my participation remained, my perspective towards debate had changed.
But with this changed perspective came a new, different kind of impostor syndrome — one that I’m still working through now. As a competitor, I often relished in my reputation as a “scrappy small school debater”: any notable victory I had was an underdog win (and who doesn’t love a good underdog?) and any loss I could easily blame on my underresourced-ness (again, I’ll note that I was definitely more privileged than the average LD national circuit debater — just a little less so than most of the people at the “top”). As a coach, I couldn’t do that anymore. You can “fake it till you make it” as a debater because the only external barometer for your success is your confidence and number of wins; you can’t do that when your “success” manifests through the students you’re working with.
While I had been cognizant of how my identity had impacted my presence in debate before, it started to become more evident. Gender minority representation in competitor pools is inadequate, but gender minority representation in coaching and camp staff is even worse — not to the fault of any debate or camp director, but because of how poor the community’s retention of gender minorities is. Many of the non-cis-male debaters/coaches/educators I’d looked up to in years past had left the activity, and I felt like I was losing the role models I’d usually turn to when debate got hard (emphasis, again, on “a lot” — there are definitely people who are still in the activity that I look up to and respect very, very much).
I grew frustrated at some of the friends I was teaching with, too: even though it was entirely in fun, the occasional comment about how I was unqualified or was teaching incorrectly exponentially increased the magnitude of my impostor syndrome. Somehow, being talked over or ignored as an instructor felt worse than being talked over or ignored as a student. Now that my role was to serve other people in the debate community (not myself), the fear of failure was more of a burden than it had ever been before.
(To clarify, not a single student I worked with — both over the summer and the season — has ever made me feel this way. I’m immeasurably grateful that not a single moment I’ve spent teaching has felt anything short of incredibly fulfilling and can almost entirely attribute my desire to stay in this activity just a little bit longer to the students I have had the pleasure of teaching. It has been refreshing to see my students fall in love with debate — and even develop a healthier relationship to it than I ever did.)
Judging, too, has a tendency to double/triple/quadruple this impostor syndrome. Since June, I’ve judged 154 Varsity LD debates (it’s ridiculous, I know), but the nervousness that accompanies it has yet to fade. It’s terrifying to know that a student’s record, career, and — probably most importantly — feelings towards debate can be affected (even if only a little) by your decision (not to self-aggrandize, of course — I don’t think any of my decisions are so significant as to affect any of these things. I’m just referencing how I felt about some of the decisions I received as a debater). No one prepared me for how terrifying it feels to submit a ballot or to refresh a decision and see you’ve sat; not because squirrelling on a panel necessarily means you’re wrong (or because being wrong about a debate is a crime), but because if you’re constantly thinking you’re not good enough/smart enough/experienced enough to be in debate, anything can feel like a reminder of that fact.
The thing about impostor syndrome — at least, in my experience — is that it starts to define every interaction you have with debate. It’s the default, so every experience you have is either proof that you are an impostor or an exception to the rule. Everyone is their own worst critic, but when you have impostor syndrome, it feels like everyone else is critiquing you, judging you, and — worst of all — realizing that you don’t belong. And when it’s never made overt or explicit, you start to assume the worst: that everyone has already accepted you’re not a “real educator” and has since moved on.
This is certainly a melodramatic description, but not inconsistent with how I’ve felt since starting to really teach debate. It’s certainly made worse when you feel as though your identity affects your relationship with debate, too. I have a distinct memory of asking my friend: “did I get hired because their coaching staff didn’t have enough gender minorities?” (my friend, of course, denied any possibility of that being the case — thank you, friend). This combination of debate-skill-impostor-syndrome, debate-coach-impostor-syndrome, and identity-based-impostor-syndrome each feel like burdens I carry into every debate-related space I enter.
The title of this essay sounds (and is, to some extent) clickbait-y, but it isn’t without reason. This essay is less reflection, more question — I’m mostly hoping that (finally) writing all of this out will help me work through my impostor syndrome a little bit more effectively. I’m certainly lucky to have had all of the debate opportunities I’ve had (and even luckier to have met so many people who keep me going in spite of my doubts). Despite the frequently negative tone I now realize I’ve projected into this essay, my experience in debate (which will surely expand) is something I would not trade for the world.
The last time I wrote about my personal experience in debate is through my aforementioned goodbye debate post, which I (dramatically) ended with “signing off for the last time”. I now know that was a bold-faced lie, given my 7-week-judging-spurt and commitment to teach at debate camp for almost the entirety of the upcoming summer. So, I’ll end this one a little differently:
Talk to you soon,
Joanne Park
