There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying bags you were never meant to keep. For most of my life, I carried pride — not the healthy kind, the quiet satisfaction of a life well-lived, but the kind that wraps itself around you like a boa constrictor and slowly, quietly, takes more than it gives.
This morning, something shifted. In a single moment of honest reflection, I finally named it. Pride. The beast I had never quite been able to identify, the invisible thing siphoning my energy for decades. Naming it changed everything.
Pride is not who you are. It is something that wrapped itself around your shoulders, then stayed.
For many of us, it started early. Being different was not safe. Being wrong, being other, standing out in the wrong way — it made you a target. So pride stepped in. It told you to manage your image, to stay one step ahead of criticism, to never let them see you uncertain. Pride kept you accepted. Pride kept you liked. Pride, in its own strange way, kept you safe.
The trouble is that what protects you in childhood can imprison you in adulthood.
Pride cost me more than I can fully calculate. It was the reason I left situations too soon and stayed in others far too long. It kept me from saying the things that mattered most: I need help. I need more time. I am afraid. It made every decision a performance instead of a choice. It filtered everything — people, opportunities, relationships — through a single distorted question: how does this make me look?
Pride was not just a personal flaw. It was a gateway.
It opened the door to bitterness, to resentment, to a jealousy I could never quite explain. It prevented me from seeing people clearly. It prevented me from seeing myself clearly. It robbed me of ease, made every uphill climb steeper, and offered nothing in return.
Whether you are reading this and recognizing yourself, or simply curious about the path I am on: pride is separate from you. It is not your identity. It is a coping mechanism that outlived its purpose. The moment you can name it, you can stop confusing it with strength.
Because it does look like strength from the outside. Pride disguises itself as high standards, as self-sufficiency, as discernment. It can even look like integrity. But integrity holds a line for what is right. Pride holds a line for your image. Knowing the difference is how you course correct.
I am not writing from a place of shame about any of this. I am writing from a place of relief.
Something that lived in my blind spot for years finally has a name. That means it has edges. That means it is finite. That means I can choose differently.
If pride has been traveling with you, you don’t have to evict it dramatically. Stop letting it make your decisions. Learn to notice when a choice is being filtered through fear of how it looks rather than grounded in what you actually know, feel, or need. Practice saying the uncomfortable true thing instead of the polished safe one.
Let yourself be a person in progress, in public, without performing certainty you do not have.
My next chapter is not for pride. Pride does not get a seat at this table. If it shows up again — and it might — I now have language to call it out and send it packing. That is more than enough.
James 4:6 — “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”
