Pride

There are infinite ways to go about analyzing pride. It is its own rainbow of stubbornness and egoism, where every color is a different intensity. It's so difficult to explain because you can only really explain how it controls you, and not necessarily anybody else. There are those of us who take pride in everything we do, but in the good way, the way that leaves us with the taste of a job well done in our mouths. Then there are those of us with that holier than Thou attitude, the ones who stand in the mirror for ten minutes at a time flexing their bro-muscles, then put on a skin-tight shirt and go torment the little kids at the park. Those would be the two extremes, and most of the rest of us fit somewhere in between.

To reiterate, pride isn't entirely that bad when manipulated in small proportions.You have to have confidence in yourself, for example, to do anything right, except fail. And yes confidence is one of those "intensities" in the spectrum that is defined as pride, but it's at the weaker end, because mostly good things come from it. You can't consume yourself with thoughts of how everyone is better than you if you plan on surviving in this Hell, but you also can't think of yourself as our Messiah. It's a tough sin to keep a peg on, because it is a necessity, but at the same time you can't just give in and become one of those jerk-offs who runs around breaking people's hearts and letting people down because you're too consumed with your own image to notice there's other people in the world. It's tough to maintain a proper balance.

It is incredibly difficult for me to explain pride in sufficient terms, because I am one of those few people who doesn't have an ego, and at times very little self confidence. That being said, I can't adequately describe the feelings it gives you when you're full of prideful ambition, not from a first-person account. I can however tell you what I see in people who are obsessed with themselves, and I can tell you that beneath every egotistical bastard is someone very much like me, someone very determined to be successful, even if they happen to be doing it for all the wrong reasons.

Everyone wants to be liked, to have something that people admire them for, and in some people that desire drives them a little too hard. I see people who admire themselves more than they respect anything, and it hurts a little, after the initial desire to stab them. They don't realize it now, because they have too many things to love about themselves, but eventually they'll be alone, and when you have that epiphany, the one that tells you you've screwed over everyone who could have loved you, you could do one of many different things. You could spend the rest of your life trying to make up for it, or you could just kill yourself. Those are the two less creative alternatives. Pride is as much a drug as any hallucinogen. It obsesses your mind with all these imaginary obstacles, forcing you to believe that you have to overcome them to have the life you deserve. And if you ever overcome them, and you very seldom do, your pride isn't there to be your crutch. It leaves you as soon as you've lost everything that counts, leaving you with nothing in this realm to save you and a broken spirit to assure you never recover. At least, that's what I see as the fate for all of those people.

Pride disgusts me more than any other sin, mostly because I don't understand it nearly as well as any of the others. I have become as intimate with the other sins as you could with a lover, but then I've got plenty of things wrong with my mind that more than constitute as a surrogate sin for pride, one of them being manic relapses, which seem a lot like what pride does to you, but then I don't really know. Pride takes what you've got and tells you you're too amazing to cherish it, too wonderful to respect it. And then when it has annihilated your inhibition, drowned your common sense, and forced you into a slew of unfavorable actions that results in you losing everything you had, it leaves you too. It works like a fanatic cult leader, filling your mind with delusions of grandeur, then force-feeding you the poisoned punch that is reality, and it simply walks away. Then you're empty, cold and alone, and immediately and easily susceptible to all of the sins that pride initially shielded you from. I guess it does give you one thing, as a sort of peace offering. It relinquishes the contemplation of suicide from what used to be taboo, but that's not really what you wanted to hear now is it?