Pride, that deadly sin

     I have many faces and many personas. I am a cut stone whose every facet shines like emerald and whose edges cut like diamond. I am every  color of the rainbow, and my roots in the soil are so deep and far-reaching that they shake hands with every other root under earth. I am as powerful and persistent as water — though my flow may be diverted it will always wear down the barriers that keep it from achieving its goals. I always end where I wanted to go.

     I am beautiful. This I know not because others have told it to me, but because I can feel it. I feel the balance of my feet against the dirt and the ease with which I am able to carry my own weight, and what else could this be than beauty? I am only as ugly as I allow myself to be, only as broken as I feel myself to have become. Only I can ruin myself; I have granted others no such privilege. I can feel, from the stability of my mind at rest and the solid weight of my head in my hands that I am just as I was meant to be — gorgeous and unmarred by the flaws of paranoia and comparison. Guilt and panic have not yet struck me down.

     I am, because of my beauty and my confidence and my security, happy. I am happy with myself as I am and as I have built myself to be. There is always room for growth, but there is also a wall to write all my virtues on. I write on this wall every last thing about myself I love, and, when I have exhausted myself of these, write down everything of me I hate. I take what I despise and dress it up as what I love and in this way learn to see things in a new light.

     My, so this must be what pride feels like.