I am not sure whether my competitive spirit came from nature or nurture.

My parents often recount a story from when I was about six years old and my grandmother mercilessly beat me in a game of Scrabble, scoffing at my three-letter words that came exclusively from Henry and Mudge books (I was a late reader). Besides having decades of literacy on me and a graduate degree from Oxford, my grandmother always played to win. So perhaps nurture?

Around the same age, I tried out for a YMCA swim team that I was entirely unqualified to join. To make the junior team, I had to successfully swim freestyle for 250 yards. I remember the burning in my lungs as I fought to stay afloat, my legs stubbornly sinking as I passed the 100-yard mark. I was the slowest kid at tryouts—by far—but my instinct to fight until the end blinded me. I made the team. So perhaps nature?

Wherever the competitive spirit came from, it came on strong. It fueled my persistent race to climb higher, seek more, and find my self-worth at elevation. I traded family movie nights for study sessions in high school, scheduled early meetings over breakfast in college, and always cared more about the destination than the journey (and resented any suggestion to do otherwise).

As I grew up and learned more, I grasped the ways in which my ambition was inevitably tethered to a capitalist and deeply American mindset that centered narratives of individualism and accumulation. After all, I was reading Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and W. E. B. Du Bois in my SOSC classes at the University. But my growing awareness did embarrassingly little to quell my impulse to chase the high of traditional success in the Lean In era.

But just as my peers were beginning their ascents up glamorous corporate ladders, collecting acceptances to prestigious graduate schools, and packing their bags for fancy fellowships abroad in our postgraduation lives, I found myself in completely uncharted territory: At 24, I became widowed.

Let me rewind.

When I was attending the University of Chicago, I met Eli Alperin, AB’19, a fellow student who cracked my world open in a way I had never experienced. Eli and I met on the first night of Orientation Week, thrown together in a house icebreaker group. We connected right away, and our friendship quickly took root, eventually growing into a relationship during our second year.

From the start, Eli challenged me. He pushed me to question my assumptions, to interrogate my beliefs, and to think more deeply about who I was and how I wanted to grow. I found his persistent questions annoying and sometimes offensive. At the same time, he believed in me with a strong, steady conviction I didn’t always understand—and that faith anchored me to the wobbly world.

In so many ways, Eli was my foil. Where I clung to self-reliance, determined to solve all my own problems, Eli asked for help. While I prioritized self-preservation, Eli lived by a fierce commitment to mutual care. When I hesitated, taking stock of our resources, Eli gave, instinctively and without calculation. He eagerly built his life in community—finding his path as a social worker, being an always friendly neighbor, and never letting a phone call go unanswered.

Eli showed me the magic of practicing care and solidarity in concert with a community. He stayed up late cooking meals for his clients, joyfully hosted an endless stream of friends and family, and drove our neighbors’ kids to soccer practices and games in Jackson Park when their parents worked on weekends—always packing extra orange slices and cheering from the sidelines.

As we wrapped our identities and futures around one another, eventually getting married a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I had to cede some of my stubborn individualism and determination. But it wasn’t until Eli died in an accident at age 25 that I understood the true magic that he’d kindled in all the spaces he traversed.

After Eli died, I could not bear returning to the apartment we shared, so I spent nearly eight months couch surfing. The parents of the children Eli once shuttled to soccer games now helped me edit a eulogy, clients he’d brought food to now sent me freshly baked date cookies and bread—not just once, but weekly—and all the people we’d hosted now put fresh sheets on their guest beds for me as I wandered the world without a place to call home.

I was held, fed, and cared for by a team of people so vast that I realized my survival was not my own: It was a collective survival. A survival that Eli had built in his life and that this community fostered in his death.

I wish he could have seen it, but I know this is what he believed in all along.

It’s now been a decade since I began my undergraduate studies at UChicago and nearly four years since Eli died. Both my 18-year-old self and 24-year-old self would be profoundly puzzled by the shape of my life today.

My life is no longer just my own. It’s built around my team—the people I care for, support, and move through each day with. The choices I make now are grounded in the reality that nothing is certain, that the next moment isn’t guaranteed. They are grounded in a world where perhaps what I need more than any promise of success is the promise of survival.

Winning means something entirely different to me these days. Winning means gathering mismatched chairs from around my home to make space for others at a crowded dinner table. Winning is the quiet hope of growing old in the company of people I love. Winning is bearing witness to the joys and sorrows that each day brings. And above all, winning is showing up, day after day, to be there for my team.

Even now, Eli is a part of that team. His memory and legacy continue to challenge me, teach me, and show me just how expansive and extraordinary life can be—even when I have my doubts.

Madeline de Figueiredo, AB’19, is a writer and journalist in Austin, Texas. Her work can be found in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere.

Photo courtesy Madeline de Figueiredo, AB’19