Proud

The word for today is PROUD. I am wondering about the difference between PROUD and pride. I am PROUD; I have pride. Parents are PROUD of their children's accomplishments; parents take pride in their children's accomplishments. Umm, maybe this is more informative...to be PROUD, to have pride; to be happy, to have happiness. There is a grammatical explanation--PROUD is an adjective; pride is a noun.

Yesterday, at the wonderful group birthday dinner party at my neighbor's house, a man I had just met asked me if I am PROUD to be Jewish and I said no. Immediately, like a good Jew, I felt guilty; one should never say she is not PROUD to be Jewish. Later though I thought, I am not proud to be a white person, I am not proud that I have brown hair (although as I age I probably will be), I am not proud that I have type A positive blood. These are characteristics that I was born with, that have nothing to do with the kind of person I have consciously decided to become. So when I said that I am not PROUD to be Jewish, what I meant was, I am Jewish, it is something I am, something I accept about myself, something that will never change.

PROUD. Am I PROUD of anything? As a Jew, I come from a PROUD people. As an upper-middle class American, raised by second generation Americans who educated themselves and achieved material success, I learned to be proud of accomplishments, to be proud of doing. It was much, much more difficult to love myself simply for being human--a white, American, Jewish, brown-haired, brown-eyed, tall, slender, long-legged, type A positive, right-handed female who breathes the air, walks the earth, swims in lakes, rivers and oceans, and lives in a third-floor apartment with two cats and a dog.

One of the many thoughts about COMMUNITY that I did not express in yesterday's post has to do with the Twelve Steps. The Twelve Step COMMUNITY is where I first learned about COMMUNITY, where I felt and experienced COMMUNITY on a deeply loving and trusting level. It is also where I learned that being PROUD, being too PROUD, can hurt me, can separate and isolate me from my fellow human beings. Pride can create an illusion that I can manage things all by myself, without help from a higher source, without the help of COMMUNITY. I don't have a positive reaction to the word PROUD. If I think of pride as the opposite of shame, I have little use for either. I strive for acceptance of myself and of others, especially those who may be proud--very, very proud or very, very ashamed of themselves on any given day.