Pride Comes

Before the fall..

Like a freshly laundered t-shirt that’s spent far too many weeks in a basket absorbing foul odours and crud from an increasing volume of unwashed laundry, endured the turbulent cycle of painfully slow washing, drowned unceremoniously in detergent, been rinsed, drowned again, then suffered the outrageous misfortune of a volatile, manically long spin, whirling above the void created by nauseating kinetics, dropped suddenly to the drum floor then spun again and again until it feels like all life has been sucked out and the incessant deep machinated rumble whose echo will continue to ring for many months, I find myself on the edges of the second spring that follows menopause.

And whilst my newly born self, gathers her long ago far-flung wits, clambering onto unsteady feet, I ask myself what is still holding me back from spreading wings that I can sense are an altogether different, vastly more liberated kind of strong and beautiful than the fear led strength and unsafe resilience of my young caterpillar self.

Pride keeps raising its ugly head above the surface of new skin.

Ugly, because that is how my past self defined it.

But now, with eyes that open wider every day, I wonder if pride really is as ugly and unwanted as I have been conditioned to believe.

What does it mean to be proud?

I was brought up to think that feeling proud of oneself was a sure and tested path to a ruinous life, that only the foolish wear pride like a fluorescent badge loudly announcing their self-assigned status above most everyone else.

Sunday school bible stories made it clear that officious Pharisees, Sadducees and other highly ranked men of the Jewish temple, who looked down upon poor ordinary folk, had too much pride. And that made sense to little me with my inbuilt aversion to hierarchical structures and institutions.

Simultaneously, my high speed, myriad routed, ever curious brain was mapping out a detailed version of life and figuring out my place in this convoluted world. Ever absorbent, I marinated in a smorgasbord of flowing ideas, pondered all manner of possibilities, and felt proud of and eager to share my discoveries with the people in my life.

It was a hugely disappointing surprise then to find out that no-one wanted to hear my wonderful ideas and fantastical (to me at least) propositions and questions.

Almost every time I tried to espouse my thoughts, someone was there to either laugh at my clearly ridiculous ideas, talk over me with their much louder, much more convinced and convincing arguments, to direct me to be quiet, know my place and above all else, stop being cheeky, or worse still, to pretend they hadn’t heard me at all.

It appeared that my personal thoughts and explorations were as unwanted as an infectious debilitating disease.

As if this emotional and mental trauma wasn’t punishment enough, I would sometimes face a physical reprimand, in the shape of a slipper to my backside, for daring to speak my mind.

Always a fastidious pupil, it wasn’t long before I learned to keep my thoughts and ideas to myself, never try to reach above the assigned station of obedient daughter, fact parroting student, foolish child, and never ever to ‘answer back’ to an angry, defensive, tired or fearsome adult or older person.

The harsh, deeply disturbing reality that my purpose in this so called civilised society was to learn by rote the unquestionable facts and his stories I was being drowned in, take them on as my own, erase all non conforming thought and become a good girl, the quiet girl everyone expected me to be, was devastating.

Ask no questions you’ll be told no lies! This was a favourite parental quote hurled in my direction whenever curiosity exceeded the low expectations of a humble, god and adult fearing, obedient child.

With little support or encouragement to think independently, I lost all confidence in myself to effectively act smart and capable. And somehow, the confidence I was losing in my true self, my ability to think, create and explore successfully, merged and fused in my delicately sensitive brain with the pride that I was assured would only lead to downfall.

Somehow, confidence and pride became two sides of the same unwanted attribute which I had to suppress at all costs in order to succeed and survive. My agitated nervous system began to believe the lie that whenever I felt confident or content, something awful would almost indefinitely happen.

Today, I am sitting with pride and it’s many meanings. Wallowing in the uncomfortableness and dis ease. Unearthing the self confidence and natural creativity my conditioning led me to believe it walks hand in hand with.

I am reconnecting with the me I was before life, or rather before western patriarchal society with it’s unhealthy fixations on hierarchies and monoculture, binary perceptions of what is right and wrong, good and bad, clamped tight our imaginations, plastered mouths, sewed insidious stitches through lips and forced us to build walls around our own hearts and minds.

Sit with me awhile. Let’s see what arises x