A Multitude of Infirmities, Part I – The Armor of Vainglory

Part I – The Armor of Vainglory
by C.S. Humble

“Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need. ”
― Khalil Gibran

If Wrath is the fruit of all my infirmities, then Pride is the root.
Most people have a whole spectrum of emotions that they experience each and every day, they shift and dance between the twinge of melancholy when the sorrows of life greet them when they leave their front step, and the gentle repine of relief when they are finally able to rest their weary heads at night. While that may be the norm, there are other people who, like myself, experience life at the edge of emotional poles. We are either experiencing the great, cresting majesty of life’s mountain peak or down in Dante’s seventh circle with no Virgil with which to find our way out of hell and back into the light. In my particular case I like to lean on the quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to express how I feel one-hundred percent of the time, rain or shine:

“We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life at its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”

When I am at the height of my mental faculties, I feel like there is no sentiment I’m incapable of pouring out onto an empty white page. When barreling along at full speed, thundering down pathways of fabled adventure, I can reach into the attic of my mind and easily grasp any obscure piece of information I need in that very moment. My brain, when at its highest register, makes me feel firm in who I am as an author. It makes me joyful, when I feel capable with the power of the written word.
And when I feel capable I, like Bellerophon, begin to believe that there is no monster I cannot slay, no great trial I cannot overcome, and no mountain that I am not worthy of conquering. I begin to believe in my own power- That I can reason all things. Examine all things. And overcome all things.  I put on the armor of vainglory – a glimmering, suit of plated vanity forged in a fire of dedication and shaped by the hammer known as the inferiority complex. My whole life I’ve always clung to the deep seeded desire to prove myself to others, to show people that I’m not just a court jester; that the purpose of my life isn’t chained to the moniker of “He failed, but tried really hard”.
I’m a big believer in the power of single-minded dedication into the efforts that make us who we want to be. I have wrapped myself in the steely notion that if I spend enough time writing, if I sacrifice enough, I’ll eventually prove to everyone that I am worth reading. And because I am prideful, as the Gibran quote above suggests, I cannot abide the hospitality of others, and even worse, their care.
I shy away from compliments and pretend like I don’t need them. I act as though affirmation is a coward’s boon, something weaker souls rely on to push them through the long, dark nights filled with self-doubt. And oh, do I struggle with doubt, especially when other folks are asleep and I’m awake writing at ungodly hours in the morning. I do that as a way to prove to others that I’m working hard enough to be worthy of their hope in my ability. And it’s strange, I know, but I feel like a man shoveling coal into a furnace, down in some dark boiler room, and if I spend enough time down there, and shovel enough of the explosive material into the raging inferno eventually a transformation will happen.
One day, I keep hoping to wake up and be good enough.
That would allow me to keep wearing the Armor of Vainglory, so I could say, “You see, I did it. All the time I sacrificed in the face of all those who told me I’d never make it, I’ve proved them all wrong.”
Myself.
Me.
I.
Those who suffer from the wound of pride, all of us, we want you to be as proud of us as we are of ourselves. And we don’t want to admit it. We couldn’t stand to look at you and say, “I need you, because I’m not enough on my own.”
And so, we wear this armor to keep others from seeing just how vulnerable we are, and after a while it stops protecting us. It looses its ability to conceal us from the weapons of our doubters, and it slowly starts to harden around the joints making us inflexible to change, the slits for seeing and breathing begin to rust over – transforming our panoply of protection into a burial coffin of our own making.
Pride buries us inside ourselves. It crushes us down. It makes us a prisoner to all of the hopes and dreams that once made us dedicated in the belief that we could make the world better by living in it fully, but those dreams now are yokes we wear around our necks. Like giant millstones cut from the mountains we once hoped to move.
At our best, we, the prideful ones, want to be an unbending structure that all our community can lean on, that our friends can call upon in their time of need. That we’re dependable when everyone else is a unreliable and shaky. We want to be there alongside you in your greatest moment of need, standing strong, shoulder to shoulder with you in the sunlight of victory, saying, “See, I told you you could count on me.”
At our worst, well, we’re uncompromising assholes who tell you that you’re not good enough, because we never feel good enough. And we’re the worst because everyone around us can see that we need help and we’re too stiff-necked to ask for or accept it.
But I want you to know that even though we may be encased in the armor, that in the deep heart of us we want to be able to remove it. We want to be able to be vulnerable. We want to know that when you see the atrophied and maligned body underneath, that you won’t turn away or betray our weakness when we are emotionally naked. We just want to know that we’re enough for you. That you can love us despite our great malady.
We need you.
I need you.
Even though I’ll never admit it.
I need you to help me believe that even though I’ve been fighting for so long to find some meaningful victory in my writing, that even if I fail, it doesn’t mean I’m worthless.
Because if I’m worthless, you don’t need me. If you don’t need me, I’m irrelevant. And irrelevancy is something even the most stout heart cannot bear.
Unbending structures when put underneath too much stress may not bend, but without needed support they do break, and then they have to be mended. Reforged, so that they can find purpose in bearing weight again. And we, the unbending, prideful friends in your life, find our hidden joy in the knowledge that you love us, accept us, and bear our burdens with us – even when we tell you not to.
I am prideful. In this way, confessed to you, I am infirm and lame.
But, I rejoice in this: “love covers a multitude of infirmities.”
Yours and mine.