I Am Trying to Break My Bad Habits

In some ways, pride can be almost like a drug. It feels so "right" when it's flowing through you, but then afterward you look around and, if you're honest with yourself, you realize that all it did was do damage to your life. And if you're not honest with yourself, then that means that you'll just keep shooting up the same drug again and again, doing more damage and hurting everyone around you, because you can't admit to yourself that the drug is a problem.

This is hard for me to say, but there was a time not too long ago when my own pride regularly led me around by the nose and told me what to do, and I listened to it like a trained monkey, doing tricks on command. More than once I lashed out, sometimes at people I cared about, purely ba<x>sed on my own wounded pride, in ways that were 100% destructive and 0% helpful to anyone. I needed to be right. I needed to win. That was more important to me than the other person or their happiness. More important to me than myself and my happiness.

I was fortunate enough to reach a point where I was finally able to admit to myself that my pride, rather than being a good thing, was actually my enemy. I stopped pushing away any knowledge of my own pridefulness, and started to dive into that knowledge instead. I owned it, let it go, and now I walk a much better path. If I weren't on that path, this story wouldn't have a second or third paragraph. Weakness is a strength. Being flawed, and letting people see those flaws, is a strength. Vulnerability is a strength. They aren't the only strengths, but in a lot of ways they're some of the most important strengths for anyone who wants love and happiness to exist in their lives, and in their hearts. For all the strength that pride gives you - the untouchable strength of prison walls - in the end, pride is only a weakness.