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*Way back in T-pisode 187 I wrote about the word forgiveness followed by T-pisode 205 where I defined my version of the word success. Two of the most difficult T-pisodes I ever forced myself to write but felt I had to share. A lot of people want to know more about my opinions on life and how I see things the way I do and the reasons behind it all. So I’m obliging. For the next 10 Mondays 2/17/14-4/21/14 I am going to write about a particular word and show the world how I define it. Something different but I hope you take something away from it all. Enjoy.
Pride is a word that gets thrown around a lot in a man’s life. Especially if you’re born an Italian man from an original, tough Boston neighborhood. Even more so if you just happen to be born a Leo, a lion. But that develops over time in life in my opinion. I never quite understood the young boys and adult men in my life when I was a child that considered themselves prideful men. Like they were special. That didn’t make much sense to me because I didn’t think you could just be born with pride. You had to have done something, achieved something to feel a sense of pride right? You don’t just get to feel pride. Prideful. That’s entitlement. And a false sense of entitlement at that. I never had respect for guys like that. But respect shall be written about on another day. Let me tell you about pride first.
Pride is when you watch your mother battle all types of health issues while she held down three jobs raising her kids while her husband was in prison. While all of this is going on she watched the world take the lives of her brother-in-law, her sister, both her parents and her husband’s parents. Never once asking for a damn thing. Never once complaining. She was too proud to complain and had too much pride to expect or ask for help. When you see that as a little boy it does something to you. At a young age you “swallow your pride” and step up. You become the man of the house and become too prideful to ever ask anyone for help yourself. “I’ll show you pride.” I’ll go to school every day. Get straight A’s. Hold down multiple jobs at the same time. Put myself through college. And pay bills and give my parents money to survive all on my own. Without asking for help. I’ll accomplish and be proud of everything I say and do without any expectations from anyone but myself. That’s the pride I had at a young age. That’s the pride I knew. That’s really not a good pride. That’s a spiteful pride. But it was the foundation for my prideful traits and characteristics that have grown within me over the years. Since then I’ve been knocked down plenty of times and was too proud to ask for help. I wasn’t swallowing my pride as a grown man. My pride made me fight. Get into fights. Walk away from fights and still be man enough to know that the world still doesn’t owe me a single thing but I will fight for it. I will fight for it all. Pride is something that every man needs to understand and understand that it means something different for every man. What’s your pride? I know mine.
I’m a prideful man now because I earned it. I can look back on my life and all that I have achieved and hear my pride telling me that I’m just getting warmed up. MY pride let me know that I was never like the other kids or grown men that I grew up around. Many of them didn’t accomplish anything in life but yet they confused pride with self-entitlement. A disgusting trait. Please don’t ever confuse pride with entitlement. Don’t ever let your ego trick you into thinking that it’s really your pride. It most certainly is not. I don’t know your story or if you understand what pride really is. But I understand what pride is and I hope my story/stories can help you understand it better as well.
Until next time. Always take it there.
T
T-blawg 