Self-esteem vs. Pride

I’m almost sure you’ve never met a more self deprecating person than me.  I can hardly think of anything about myself that I like, ever. I’m too thin in the wrong places, too fat in the wrong places, not smart, can be selfish, mean, moody and on and on.  Head to toe, you pick a part & I’ll tell you what I don’t like about it.  Since that’s the case, the one sin/flaw I never worried about having a problem with was pride.  I also thought that allowing the world to see all that I’ve been going through lately and putting up the donation button on the site was me being humble.  I am being shown how wrong I was on all accounts. 

I thought Xanax was the nastiest tasting pill created, but I was wrong, it’s the pill of pride.  It has that same stomach turning taste as crow – which I also had a heaping dose of today.  I let the world see what I was going through here because I don’t really know the world and it doesn’t know me.  Anonymity let me avoid total embarrassment.  When things got really bad I deleted a number of people from my FB simply b/c I didn’t want them to know their lives were far better than mine and mine had turned out a far cry from they way we all thought it would.  When I spoke to my sister she asked me why I have such a problem coming back to live in my hometown and it dawned on me that the real reason I didn’t want to move home was that I was embarrassed to possibly run into people I know and have to explain why I no longer live in TX or FL (depending on when I saw them last).  I didn’t want them to know that I no longer have a car & that I’m filing for disability.  All of these things are actually pride based.  Sure there’s some shame involved with facing my past (parents & daughter), but even that has a certain amount of pride tied to it.  I don’t want to need my parents- esp my mother. I wanted to prove that I could do it on my own, that I could move hours away with no one and make it.  Obviously that didn’t happen, and it would be one thing if my mother was a ‘prodigal father’ type, but she isn’t.  She’s an ‘I told you so!’ (over and over no less) mother type.  She’s still rubbing it in that I didn’t follow her advice 9 years ago and have an abortion for crying out loud.  So, it appears that the place I’ve been running from is the place I’m likely headed within a week & with that realization I started planning how I could avoid anyone I have ever known- including most family.  I could go to Wal-Mart after midnight, not go to any family functions, definitely not go to church (mine or any others where I know anyone goes), take a total break from FB… basically hide out until things were the way I want/need them to be and then I could re-emerge- likely with a bs story about where I’d been in between.  That’s PRIDE, and it just isn’t in that area- I do (or don’t do) tons of things just to save face.  Sigh. The truth will set you free alright, but it’ll punch you in the stomach first.  

Now, just because I realized it don’t expect me to put some announcement in the paper that I’m home, but I have to face the truth and I can’t face it by hiding from the world.  It wasn’t even easy for me to type this entry, and it may end up deleted later if I think too much on it.  No joke.  So, yeah, in summary I thought I was humble, but it turns out I’m prideful as crap.   Now if I could just lower the pride and have some miraculous self-esteem uprising… lol