Recently, during a discussion with friends, I admitted, “YES, I HAVE A SUPERIORITY COMPLEX! ”
I thought about it the whole day. Did I do the right thing? What would she and the others who heard me, think about me? Is that bad? Is it something that will give me bad karma? What is the penance that I should do to get out of it now?
By the end of the day, I could no longer carry the burden of this thought. I decided to take stock of all the ill effects of this statement. I made a list of things that I did during the day.
My list looked like this:

• I ran a couple of extra miles thinking about the consequences. (Which earned me a trail shoe badge on my fitbit tracker 🙂 )

• I ate more salad and less curry for lunch because all food tasted the same with this thought lingering in my belly.

• I did not watch the TV series that I would usually watch. I spent that time in responding to some queries that my friends had put up on the WhatsApp groups. I had to prove that having a superiority complex does not stop a person from helping their friends.

• I touched base with some of my school friends whom I had avoided for some time.

• I smiled, greeted and spoke to my (grumpy) neighbor.

• I read up on the Internet more about human behavior, superiority and inferiority complexes etc.

“Not bad! ” I thought. “Other than the one statement that I made in the morning, everything else seems to work in my favor. So applying the rules of integers, all these positives should be able to cancel that one negative. ”
In conclusion, acceptance of my superiority complex had not done me any harm. (Ha….Math comes to my rescue again! )
Now, I am trying to understand the meaning of the following definition that I found on the Internet:
“The superiority complex is one of the ways that a person with an inferiority complex may use as a method of escape from her or his difficulties. She or he assumes that she or he is superior when she or he is not, and this false success compensates her or him for the state of inferiority, which she or he cannot bear. The normal person does not have a superiority complex; she or he does not even have a sense of superiority. She or he has the striving to be superior in the sense that we all have ambition to be successful; but so long as this striving is expressed in work it does not lead to false valuations, which are at the root of mental disease.”
What does that mean????????????
I don’t even think I have the one that is described there.
Huh… the complexity of complexes!!
 

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