A request of pride

allison, i would like you, if you can and dont mind, is do a session on pride. you may have already done it because ive only started doing comments for like a month but anyway i mean like ask people what makes them proud and stuff please. if you read this i would appreciate a chat about it please.

JONNY

So this was a message requesting a post on pride. Here it goes.  When I think of pride, several things come to mind. One is my ego, that damn image I have of myself that I always seem to bring up when I need an excuse not to do things that scare or intimidate me.

Actually, let’s focus on that pride for this posting, then tomorrow we can explore further!

As some of you may know, I am directing this season. I was let off the hook last season due to the writer’s strike, but now this season it is back on again. And now I have no excuses. This is an opportunity I can’t pass up and yet every time I think about the process I feel as though I am going to throw up.

It’s that image, that pride, rearing it’s head and I feel like thwarting that character I believe I am in my day to day life is a fate worse than death. Facing failure and testing my pride– hell, even proving my believe in myself wrong, is like the scariest thing in the world to me. But if this is something I never test, if I walk through my life believing that I can do things I have never in fact tried or tested, how strong and confident will that pride really be.

One slip and the whole thing is torn apart.

It is my belief that the only way to build a foundation of self that is substantial, that won’t crumble at the first sight of questioning or failure, is to, in fact, fail. And then learn how to put the pieces back together from beginning to end. Then you truly understand how the curves and crevices fit and you have no fear of it falling to pieces again, cause you know it is no big thing to re-lay the concrete.

But man getting over that initial sense of fake self-confidence is a doozy.

More on this tomorrow

xo
allison

oh and by the way, my sites gonna be down for a few hours tonight and tomorrow due to some reconstruction! I’m redecorating! Fun!

I will share a little story with you! I was walking through a neighborhood in downtown Vancouver and this particular part of town does not have the best reputation. In fact, I think at one point in time it had the highest rate of HIV infection and heroin addiction per capita in North America. Give you a little bit of a picture?

Now because of this there are many people without homes on the streets and my general assumption when I am walking through these streets is that I need to put my head down and walk quickly. It’s “dangerous”. Now is there some truth to this? Absolutely! I don’t want to act like a moron and walk down the street the way I would my parents neighborhood, but I also want to be sure that I don’t begin to look at the people around me as less than human.

So, I am barreling through this block just trying to get from one stoplight to the next so I can relax, and I see a man crossing the street to come towards me, and I freeze. I put up my guard and immediately thinking he is going to ask me for money. Not one minute after my steel-wall of “safety” was firmly in place, did this man say to me, “I just wanted to tell you I like your dress.”

Done. No, “Spare change miss?” No, “Fucking rich bitch.” Nothing but a sweet comment from another human being.

I saw a wonderful Tibetan Monk speak a few months ago and he stated (now I am paraphrasing so bear with me) that, “The problem with the world comes from the fact that we don’t trust ourselves, therefore we don’t trust each other. We spend all our resources building stronger locks and bigger walls to lock ourselves in.”

So, when does it end? When does the fear caused by prejudice become so debilitating that we forget to live our lives? When does our fear of death become so powerful that we kill our selves prematurely out of an attempt to elongate something we aren’t even utilizing? Our time here on this earth is precious. We get one go at this.

Now I am not saying to be ridiculous, as I said in previous blog posts, it’s all about balance, but I challenge and urge you to look at where you prejudices lie and attempt to challenge or reverse them. See where you ride an invisible horse shrouding yourself in the white sheet of assumption.

It is a really interesting experiment.

Ciao
Allison