Funny Mental Insights: 54: Freewrite on Pride

The prompt is to do a 5 minute freewrite on a human attribute for "pride". I'm going to start with the word. (A freewrite is where I just write for 5 minutes, just keep typing. I don't correct grammar or spelling or even make sure it makes sense. To be nice to the reader, I went back after I was finished and cleaned up the spelling and punctuation, but I didn't edit for content, so it still might not make much sense.)

"Pride goeth before a fall," it says somewhere in the Bible. Mom always used to tell me that, over over again. Mom really didn't want me to be a proud person, someone who was so stuck on himself that no one ever liked him and people always thought he was a jerk. Pride was always wrong.

I don't think that way anymore. I think pride is wrong a lot of times, and certainly something to be careful about, but it's not bad in and of itself and sometimes it's a good thing. I'm proud of what I've done in many situations. Not that only I could do it or that I'm better than everyone else, but I just think I did something good or pretty or whatever and I think it's good for me to be proud of it.

I wrote a story yesterday that was sort of meant to be kind of silly, but one character, Practical Guy, was a kind of voice of reason that no one listens to. He actually says what I think in the story. I wonder if that's not a kind of pride. I didn't invent him to be my voice, just kind of a foil to the silliness of the situation, a straight man of sorts, and a guy who could bring attention to some of the more subtle gags. Still, I wonder if that's how I see myself: a guy who speaks sense when everything's silly, and who is roundly ignored.

If so, that's not a really good kind of pride.