Humble Seaweed

"Humility - once a widespread personal trait characterized by an ability to accurately acknowledge one's limitations and abilities, and an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than self-focused."  Current Direction in Psychological Science

Humility:  Modest opinion of one's own importance, rank, etc.; the feeling that you have no special importance that makes you better than others; absence of vanity or excessive pride.

Arrogant:  Unpleasantly proud and behaving as if you are m ore important than, or know more than, other people; exaggerating one's own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner.

Ouch.

It's all fear.  The drive to elevate myself is just an expression of the fear that other people won't think as much of me as I think of myself.

Fear is a pretty natural human attribute.  We alcoholics tend to blame everything on our disease, overlooking the fact that it's a scary world out there from time to time.  Sometimes someone really IS after you.  There really ARE bears in that dark cave.

That being said my alcoholism exacerbates this fear.  And for a lot of us I believe you can find wiring problems that predispose us to fear and family environments that stoke anxiety and let's not forget that our behavior led to a lot of fearful situations.

I'm thinking this morning of a friend who is pissed as hell at the CoVid-19 lock-down.  He's chafing at the restrictions.  He's chomping at the bit to get back to live meetings where he can keep up a steady patter about how irritating everyone is.  He's a good guy who helps a lot of people but he really seems to be on a life Death March, grimly stalking through the day, fending off one restriction after another.

I would prefer to avoid that attitude.