I grew up with many sayings and one of them was “pride comes before a fall.” I literally had to take a fall to realise that accusing someone of being proud is one thing, but if it gets under your skin and bothers you to the point of acting on it out of anger, that means you are hardly any better.

The truth is, the wise and emotionally secure are silent because they have nothing to prove and they do not let people bother them. They feel neither a desire nor need to retaliate or waste their breath on someone with whom they do not see eye-to-eye.

Perhaps I could have been more “zen” in my way of thinking and better equipped to grasp this concept of being the bigger person, but this was obviously not the case when I was a seven-year-old tomboy.

When I was growing up, I knew that pride had many faces to it and it could wear several hats.

However, the sort of pride that was always clamouring for attention and banked on the need to prove something to the world existed in my neighbourhood back then. It was in the form of a nasty boy who called himself ‘Superman’.

He was my nemesis.

‘Superman’ was a mean-spirited bully who I thought fit the description of the ‘Incredible Hulk’ far better because he was such a volatile, angry kid.

Anyway, I used to own a pair of roller skates. They were the old school ones with the small wheels where you need to strap your foot onto the metal base. I was pretty fast on them, and secretly proud of this fact.

My cousins used to race me and that was when word spread to ‘Superman’ that I could beat a person on a bicycle simply with my roller skates.

Mind you, my cousins did not ride their bicycles the way ‘Superman’ did. He was a reckless maniac on wheels.

When I was dared to participate in a dangerous race by the rudest, meanest boy in my neighbourhood, my cousins immediately said, “No, Jojo, don’t be silly. You could break your neck. Let’s go home.”

However, ‘Superman’ started pushing all my buttons.

He was taunting me, saying I was “scared” to race against someone as fast and skilled as him. I was getting really annoyed at how obnoxious and cocky he was. I felt myself getting red in the face (look, things have changed a bit – I was only seven), and I reached that tipping point where I made a decision against my better judgment to race against him.

Suddenly, a bunch of kids gathered to watch this race. I knew very well that ‘Superman’ couldn’t afford to lose to me. He would never live it down for the following reasons:

• I was on tiny wheels compared to him.
• I was a girl. It would have been a fatal blow to his ego, plus he hated girls and it annoyed him that I had already beaten a few boys in the neighbourhood. He felt he needed to put me back in my place.
• He was older than me and when you’re a kid, a few years is actually a big difference.

It was for these reasons he could not lose this race and it was for these same reasons I felt I had to win.

So, there we were at the starting line, which was a straight road between the houses. The moment the race began, I was practically sprinting on my skates and we were almost neck to neck. I ran as if my life depended on it and I managed to get ahead of him and widen the gap between us.

It was at this moment that something unforeseen happened.

My skates got caught on a piece of gravel from the road and the stone got trapped in the wheel – immediately jamming it.

At breakneck speed, I tumbled onto the road. My left hand was flung out, palm facing up to the sky.

Instead of ‘Superman’ halting the race or stopping to check if I was alright, he actually ran over my wrist that was on the road. I still have a faint scar to this day because the skin on my wrist came off.

He had no remorse whatsoever for what he had done. He said it was my fault for racing against him and I should have known better.

This could have triggered another round of heated discussion but I held my tongue because I realised how pointless it was trying to reason with a person who was never going to back down or see where I was coming from. You just can’t win against someone who has a completely different point of view.

In retrospect, what was disturbing me was not the fact I lost the race.

It was why I participated, to begin with. Why do we give so much power to the people we don’t want to associate with? Why do we waste our precious time and efforts?

When you have too much pride, bear in mind you could be setting yourself up for an unnecessary fall.

Jojo Struys is the founder of ‘OHANAJO awake’, an online conscious platform to help people with their stress, anxiety and sleep via microlearning courses that can be done in less than 15 mins per day.

Please visit www.ohanajo.com for a free trial.