Rough Hewn: Dignity, Not Vanity

As a child, when people declared pride in their gender, ethnicity, or country, you felt confused. You never understood the pride of being born into something.

What have you done to deserve your gender? Your ethnicity? Your country? You did not make them. They arrived before you did, as naturally as the weather. To be proud of them would be like being proud that it rained.

Pride, if it must exist, belongs elsewhere. Pride belongs to the carpenter who shapes a table from stubborn timber, to the farmer or gardener who grows flowers from dry earth, or to those who create something with their own hands against the indifference of time.

Yet you find yourself defending what you never claimed to have achieved.

This is the strange part. You do not defend these things because they make you feel greater than others. You defend them because they are part of what makes you who you are. They are not medals pinned to your chest; they are circumstances from which your life was made: your ethnicity, your gender, and your nationality.

You did not choose them, but neither did you choose to be diminished because of them.

So when contempt comes disguised as judgment, you resist it—not out of vanity, but out of dignity.

Vanity says, “I am better than you.” Dignity says, “I am not lesser than you.”

Defending oneself against an attack on one’s gender, ethnicity, or nationality is sometimes nothing more than refusing to disappear.

A tree holds on to its patch of earth with its roots when a storm attacks it. It does not want to prove that its roots deserve the earth; it just holds.

Maybe that is what you are doing: holding on to your roots. Not to feel above anyone, and not against anyone.

Just holding on to the small piece of earth that, by the accident of existence became yours.

Your existence is not a question that anyone else gets to answer.

Read More Essays here: Rough Hewn

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Shon Mehta is an author and philosopher, creator of the Jivavarta Universe—a grounded sociopolitical world exploring human resilience, social dynamics, and moral philosophy through systems thinking. Her novels (The Timingila, Lair of the Monster), poems, aphorisms, parables, and stories are used in academic curricula internationally and featured by Oxford University Press.