I’ve taken a pause from writing lately, for three reasons: One, I’ve been busy and didn’t want the pressure, although pressure has been my driving force in the past — I love pressure. Two, I’m digesting and decomposing life and information as it’s moved through me this year, and it has felt important to take space to allow myself the capacity to do so. Three, adding to my first point, if we’re doing something to create because we feel the pressure of creation, is what we’re creating a benefit to the world or is it bringing with it an edge? If so, does that edge create more arrogance and agitation in the world?
I’ve been exploring these things within myself.
Not everything is meant for everyone, not all processes are meant to be shared; in fact sharing can even dismantle the depth of learning and integration we’re capable of. It can dissolve the impact something has had on us. It’s worth holding onto things until they have long passed, until we’ve digested them. Once that happens, we may no longer feel called to share.
Oversharing can be a form of disconnection, in the same way that filling your life with movement and constant connection is a form of disconnection from self. Oversharing can be a way we lack integrity within ourselves, a way to seek attention or approval. I often explore my relationship with sharing, especially as I get older and am able to steady myself better in seasons of decomposition and digestion.
However, there’s a share that I’m prepared to unpack. It’s something I’ve been working with for a while, and I feel that I can offer something without revealing deep personal aspects of my process. I’ve been digging deep into my arrogance, into the rich and rooted part of myself that has become more obvious and harder to ignore. The way I’ve built it up to hide from the world or to try to prove my worth to those around me.
My arrogance is quite insidious, embedded in my soul from my ancestors and society. It’s a complicated thing to sift through as I see it shows its brazen self daily, hourly or even more frequently. It’s been a radical excavation of my separation from others, yet it prefers to yield its power by standing like a ghost in front of me. I didn’t see it until I spent enough time looking at this ghost and recognizing its presence in my life.
Although I can’t take credit for the development of my arrogance, if I could it might be easier to dissolve. I see that it’s been carried forward by my heritage, that it was something I learned without even recognizing it. My entire family carries this, and we hold on tight to it. We feel the power of it because it’s strong, able to hide in plain sight so that we can’t see it in ourselves. It’s just us, it’s what we know, so like anything that we’ve unconsciously collected as ways of being or seeing the world, it’s hard to unpack until it confronts us in a way that we can no longer unsee.
In truth, modernity loves arrogance: we love the high in judging others, we love the passionate views we hold, we adorn ourselves in knowing more than those around us. We drip in our own obsessions with money, wisdom, and intelligence, in truly knowing more than others and using that to control and manipulate in ways we’re usually unaware of.
My arrogance loves driving shotgun, it loves having the answers, it loves speaking. It loves being the center of attention, even if that attention is just capturing my own mind and thoughts. My arrogance dislikes silence, it wants to speak and take over, it doesn’t want to sit and digest the lessons. It wants to share and (over) explain to others why sharing what I know with someone will help them in some way.
As I’ve explored this relationship with my own arrogance I see it in others. Some of us carry it like a shotgun in the back window of our truck, while others hide it under the hood of a car that’s distinctly indistinct, either way making us feel like we fit in and stand out all at the same time. We hide our arrogance by using the frenzied energy of being seen to disguise it. We mask it in social media. We apply it to our families and paint it on our houses.
We overshare while we under-connect; we lack discernment and resilience. We don’t take time to digest our learnings. So many people are developing businesses after taking a single course or minimal training, and then going out in the world and sharing their unintegrated and undigested (and possibly immature) learnings and creating retreats and courses without actually taking the years it takes to learn and embody to truly understand what was taught.
We need to be more discerning with people, there’s a lot of un-integration and arrogance floating our economy.
When I was working as a river and mountain guide, I always worked with one or two other guides. That line of work offers so many interesting tales that are often wild, and often told by great story teller. I love a good story, and I love to listen to a quality storyteller; people who are skilled in storytelling are a must on an expedition. Colourful tales light the heart and expand our minds.
However, some people confuse storytelling with talking about themselves. Telling people about yourself isn’t the same as sharing a riveting story. I’ve worked with people who would go on about their wild adventures, droning on about themselves and what they’ve accomplished. I found it obnoxious before social media, and now we’ve created a whole culture around self-aggrandizing.
Boasting about oneself online has become a cultural norm that normalizes people sharing their adventures, relationships, and accomplishments. Everyone becomes an armchair expert and this promotes a culture of pathologizing ourselves and each other.
The point I’m attempting to make is that arrogance is insidious, none of us immune to this within us. Some of us are just more obvious than others, we show it in ways others can easily see.
The hardest thing is to see ourselves. When we have those ‘aha’ moments, when the reality of ourselves is on display for us to see for the first time, those moments of time are often the most affronting and difficult to work through. I think this is why my arrogance has gone through a long process of unpacking, because seeing it and muddling my way through how it shows up to prevent me from seeing, is wild.
May we all find a little more softness with ourselves as we move through the messy inner workings of our belief systems and minds.
with love, Noelle