Between Everywhere and Nowhere

Tag: self-awareness

  • The Ordinary Roots of Arrogance

    The Ordinary Roots of Arrogance

    The quality of being unpleasantly proud.
    Behaving as if you are more important or knowledgeable than others.

    These are the usual connotations of the word arrogance.

    When looking at dictionary definitions, arrogance seems to emerge from a feeling of superiority. However, is that always the case?

    These kinds of terms are often associated with illusionary perceptions of the self. But what if the opposite is also true?

    Can a person carry a certain type of arrogance simply because they are too aware of themselves?

    Why is it rarely considered that self-awareness itself can become a legitimate reason for wrapping ourselves in the silk fabric of arrogance?

    Does it always have to be something negative? Does it always distance us from our surroundings in an illusionary way?

    I have always known that my way of thinking did not appeal to many people in many situations. Once, when I had the chance, I wanted to transfer my messy way of thinking onto a blank white paper and use all the non-traditional connections in my writing. The result? Of course I failed.

    At the time, one of my professors anonymously used my paper as an example of failure in class. Although I had literally failed, it did not feel destructive. Rather, I saw it as a chance to observe how my way of thinking was perceived within my own habitat.

    After that, I decided to keep the genuine side of my mental world to myself and started using my mind in saving mode, literally. I began analyzing the way that professor was thinking. It turned into a small experiment for me. I noted the words he used, his sentence structures, the way his mind connected subjects and pulled arguments from one point to another. I think one of the best parts of being a student is having enough time for these kinds of observations.

    Anyway, that day came and I had a second chance to write freely again. Was it really me writing those thoughts, or was I simply pretending? I still do not know.

    I filled that paper while imagining myself as if I were that professor. What would he write if this were his assignment?

    My second paper was declared the perfect assignment, by the way.

    You may ask, “We started with arrogance and somehow arrived at an ordinary memory that anyone could experience.” But I think the real question is this: where is the border between being arrogant and carrying yourself with a certain degree of arrogance?

    For me, it was realizing to what extent I was being accepted, and to what extent I could bend myself if I truly wanted to fit in. It was also realizing how ordinary I actually was.

    At some point, I also realized that what I truly thought, or who I genuinely was, was rarely important to most environments in the first place. People usually accepted the version of you that functioned well enough within the structure around them.

    After noticing this, I think I started leaving only a measured amount of ordinariness behind me wherever I went. Just enough to fit naturally into the atmosphere, but never enough to feel entirely dissolved inside it.

    Knowing my own limits and ordinariness strangely brought me a sense of arrogance throughout the years. It created a subtle separation between me and others. Because I was fully aware of myself, with both my strengths and weaknesses, I knew I could tame myself accordingly if necessary.

    That self-control, and perhaps self-manipulation towards the outer world, became the main fabric of my arrogance.

    Everyone else was ordinary too. The only difference was that many people were not fully aware of it yet.

    Sometimes the feeling of superiority can come from being absolutely grounded.

    Sometimes I ask myself: could arrogance also be a way of coping with having a painfully solid place in this world? Being ordinary in the most ordinary way can also hurt. Then you start thinking: “I achieved, I endured, I learned, and I still remained within this ordinariness.”

    That is usually the moment when a subtle arrogance taps you lightly on the back, wraps itself around you, and quietly becomes your shadow.

    Maybe arrogance is not always born from illusion.

    Sometimes it grows quietly from knowing exactly where you stand.

    Who knows.

    Artwork: The Travelling Companions, Augustus Leopold Egg

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  • Am I Destined to Be a Crisovore?

    Am I Destined to Be a Crisovore?

    Or Just Learning How to Rest on Grass That Still Itches

    Sometimes the dynamics of life arrive not as a path, but as a series of collisions. Something breaks, shifts, disappears, or turns against the shape of who you thought you were. And because survival rarely waits for readiness, you learn quickly how to turn damage into utility.

    We are told to make lemonade out of lemons that life gives us. But some lemons are too bitter, too sharp, too misplaced to belong anywhere. So, you learn something subtler than optimism: if sweetness is impossible, extract zest. If healing is delayed, produce function. If nothing fits, make use of what wounds you.

    At first, this feels like resilience. Later, it becomes identity.

    Over time, crisis stops being an interruption and becomes a habitat. You no longer respond to intensity; you metabolize it. You become fluent in urgency, efficient in uncertainty, strangely calm in disorder. There is no official term for this transformation, so I made one: crisovore.

    A crisovore is someone who has learned to feed on crisis.

    Not because they enjoy suffering, but because disruption became the environment in which their strengths were formed. Some people grow in gardens. Others learn in storms.

    I had to scratch myself out of crisis at almost every stage of my life. I lost my father and learned that the worst fear can, in fact, become reality—and life continues anyway. I was betrayed by people I trusted and discovered that disappointment can clarify character faster than affection ever does. When I entered professional life, a pandemic began. And in a strange paradox, that global rupture created opportunities for growth within my field.

    Whether internal or external, personal or collective, crisis seemed to arrive with consistency. Enough times, and you begin to wonder: am I finding crisis, or has crisis found me? Do I endure it because I can, or have I simply built myself around expecting it?

    We often celebrate what hardship teaches us. Discipline. Perspective. Endurance. Adaptation. And those lessons are real. But there is a quieter consequence people rarely discuss: what happens when crisis becomes familiar enough to feel necessary?

    Because familiarity has its own gravity.

    Intensity begins to resemble meaning. Urgency feels like direction. Constant problem-solving mimics purpose. You wake up alert, needed, mobilized. Every day asks something of you, and in answering it, you feel alive.

    Then one day, life softens.

    Nothing is collapsing. No emergency needs containing. No immediate threat is sharpening your attention. The phone is quiet. The room is still. And instead of relief, you feel unease.

    Calm, for the unpracticed, can feel unnatural.

    Peace does not always arrive as comfort. Sometimes it arrives as emptiness. Sometimes it feels like a waiting room before the next disaster. Sometimes it is mistaken for stagnation simply because it lacks adrenaline.

    What does one do when life finally feels safe, but something inside does not trust safety? How do you distinguish between what is healthy and what is merely less stimulating? What happens when you feel tempted to recreate chaos, not because you want pain, but because pain is recognizable and calm is not?

    Living through crisis can resemble addiction—not in spectacle, but in rhythm. Like caffeine, it sharpens perception and lends momentum. It gives structure to the day. Its absence can feel less like peace and more like withdrawal: a low ache, a restlessness without object, a sense that something important has gone missing.

    Not the crisis itself, but the intensity.

    We speak often about rebuilding after hardship. We speak less about remaining present when nothing is broken. Yet perhaps this is the more difficult task.

    Crisis demands reaction. Calm demands tolerance.

    Crisis tells you what to do next. Calm asks whether you know who you are without instructions.

    Crisis can make you feel chosen, central, necessary. Calm asks whether existence needs drama to feel valid.

    So perhaps the real question is not whether we can survive crisis. Many of us already know that we can.

    The real question is whether we can live without organizing our inner world around it. Whether intensity can become an experience rather than a dependency. Whether peace can be learned with the same seriousness with which survival once was.

    Maybe there is no final balance, no permanent arrival. Maybe life is only this ongoing negotiation between two selves: the one trained by disruption, and the one still learning how to stay when nothing is on fire.

    Perhaps growth, for some of us, is not learning to survive the lava, but learning to rest on the grass. And who ever said the grass would not trigger an allergy of its own?

    Artwork: Carola i soffan, Gustaf Cederström

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