Proud

They say pride before a fall, but what is pride?

It seems we don’t need to be aligned to any sort of ikigai for it to be felt. For it to need protecting.

Our football team wins and we’re bolstered. A humiliating loss and we’re fragile.

We get that promotion or we get that redundancy.

Is pride supposed to be so fleeting? Or are we just a touch misaligned on a couple of things?

Is pride just acceptance of ourselves? Or at least the version of ourselves that we have grown accustomed to. The version we’ve most recently signed off on.

Sometimes a pride in our authentic selves can seem jarring to others. Perhaps it’s rare to see. Perhaps it’s a juxtaposition of sorts.

Is authenticity at scale too complex to freely accept. Do more of us feel more comfortable with understandable variants of known templates? Or are these things too complex and us too overwhelmed?

We all know those who only show up when they have their very own breaking news. We know those who stay quiet during others.

Maybe pride comes after a fall. Maybe we’ve fallen and the echoes are calls for help that aren’t being understood.