Pride

Pride. Such a double-edged sword. We know when we are right, so it's understandable to want to defend our point at any cost...any cost. Do we ever sit down and calculate the cost of being right? Are we but products of a life in which any self love and sense of pride have been beaten out of us? Now that we have a chance to have our voices heard, our feelings exposed to someone who gives a damn about them...are we more preoccupied with having the control we were never able to achieve with anyone else?

What happens when pride is overrun by pettiness...selfishness? Part of getting the last word in a confrontation is being aware of the price you're paying for getting your way. You may just be making somebody pay for someone else's mistakes. Maybe someone else mistreated you...and what are you doing now, if not making this new person pay for other issues that lie somewhere out of your relationship with them? This is how you're repaying a brand new start, an opportunity...by becoming the very thing you loathed about others and how they treated you. That's how you're treating them. So, great, you won the battle. But you lost the war.

The point is that, sometimes, it is more than just pride or winning, even if you are on the correct side of an exchange. Everyone has a breaking point...that last straw that makes them realize that maybe they have been naive. That they too can be proud if they choose to, and they can cease to apologize or take the blame. No one wins. Pride wins. So, maybe Pride can sit with you and provide you with dinner company. Pride can tuck you to bed. Pride can fill the silence. You can love your Pride, but the Pride will only love itself. Rather expensive price to pay to prove a point that never existed, wouldn't you say? If you swallow your pride for those who aren't worth it or even thank you for doing so...why can't you do the same for the ones who need you and treat you with love and like you're worth something? Those who want to be in your life because, well, they just want to...not because they need things from you?

What's worth saving, when it's all said and done? We all will lay in the bed we made for ourselves. How do you want that bed to be?

"I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine." ~ Elizabeth Bennet, Pride & Prejudice - Austen