Am I arrogant?

I just the last few months of my life quiet trying to avoid judgement. When you live in a foreign country, and you can hardly speak the language, it's quite normal for people to humiliate you on a daily basis. Since then, I've begun to wonder about my level of self-assuredness in the U.S.

I just received a message on MySpace:

"afriend of mine told me you were the most stuck up and completely full of yourself person hes ever met"

For the moment, I am going to let the punctuation pass, as much as it gives me a slight headache looking at it. I received this comment from some random person. He was looking over my account (which I never check) and read where I had put, "I'm smart... or smarter than you." I mean, it's a joke obviously. Everyone knows that I value my intellect, but I don't really believe I'm smarter than everyone.

I wondered to what degree this other person must have just ripped me to shreds for this friend to go out of their way to insult me. What story must this person know about me to go onto my MySpace in order to make me feel bad?

One of those great injustices in life is that people will hate you. Maybe you know who it is, and you don't mind. Maybe you know who it is, and you wish they'd give you a second chance. Maybe you don't know who it is, and you wish you could know just to ask for forgiveness or explain yourself. I bet it has to do with my short romance with Objectivism. But people really don't get it: Objectivism is not about believing you're perfect. It's about not letting other people run your life for you.

The thing is, this person clearly thinks I'm a horrible person. I now feel horrible. The most stuck up person they've ever met?

I believe what I believe. I try to believe things based on fact. I don't give into other people's arguments just because they say so. I don't call that arrogance; I just call it being smart.

If I have offended you with my self-confidence, I'm sorry. I care about the world around me, and I do everything in my power to positively effect it. The opinions I have, the actions I make, I do them all with purpose: to make the world better. Sometimes I'm wrong. But my goal has never and will never change. My self-confidence probably won't go away. The only solution is to change my "self" to be a little more right in the future than it has been in the past.