This Is Us

The Snowflake’s Guide to Victory

Why participation trophies matter to godless millennials like me

My childhood bedroom is, in the way that all childhood bedrooms are, uniquely unspectacular. There’s the perpetually unmade bed, surrounded by pictures and ticket stubs finely coated in dusty nostalgia. There’s the framed poster of the only NBA Big Three I’ll ever acknowledge, and the watercolor painting of Captain America wearing nothing but a helmet and a strategically-placed mighty shield (which still might be the best thirty bucks I’ve ever spent in my life). There are game cartridges, action figures, and books; gods above, there are the books.

And then there are the trophies.

Some of these memorialize genuine triumphs, insofar as anything a pubescent boy ever does can be called a triumph. Like the first place Speech Fair ribbon for my stirring recitation of President Andrew Shepherd’s impassioned defense of love and Sorkinist liberalism from 1995’s The American President, or the Spelling Bee trophy that kicked off my run all the way to the city championships where I flamed out on “kugel.” Others are viciously ironic, like the Defensive Player of the Year plaque after a basketball season in which my team lost every game.