The Conversation
Ego Vs Self Esteem
G’day legends. Did ya miss me?
It’s been a minute since I’ve posted anything here, and I apologise. I’ve been meaning to. I’ve just been busy, and if I’m being frank, since I’ve been surrounding myself with more sobriety, the need to write about what’s going on in my life or my precious little feelings is not as strong as it once was.
However, that’s selfish of me. I feel somewhat obligated to share whatever I can, hoping to help other people who are still struggling. Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, other vices, ADHD or other mental health issues, I owe it to people to talk about what is and isn’t working for me because when I need help, it’s there for me too. This shit is circular. I can’t just take. I have to give it away, too.
I feel like I’m finally starting to make some progress on this low self-esteem of mine. I feel like an idiot that it’s taken me as long as it has to have these realisations because, like all realisations, they seem so glaringly obvious only after you’ve had them.
It’s important because I feel like all or most of my mental health issues are ratcheted off of my self-esteem. The lower my self esteem, the worse my anxiety, the more susceptible I am to depression and all around negative thinking.
I’ve realised that my self-esteem and ego are opposite sides of a sea saw. If my self-esteem is low, my ego is entirely in charge. When have you ever seen a sea saw sitting perfectly balanced on its own? My ego was a defence mechanism. It protected me from accepting the truth. My ego would tell me that I had everything under control. It would justify all of my shitty behaviour to me. My ego would convince me that everything wrong that’s ever happened in my life resulted from the actions of some other person or thing. It was never my fault. My ego was that bad influence you don’t want your kids to hang out with. My ego was the voice that told me it was ok and encouraged me to live a life outside of my values.
Being fuelled by ego seems excellent at the time. You walk around doing whatever the fuck you like. You worry about no one but yourself. You invest all of your time, money and energy in yourself. How good is that! You get all the attention, all the money, all the everything you get to spend on yourself. It also helps me achieve things. It tells me I’m capable of things that I myself don’t necessarily believe I am.
The problem for me is that my ego had to coexist with this other thing called my conscience. My ego would take charge during the day, but my conscience was there once the ego was done for the day. My conscience is there all the time. It observes everything that I do. It doesn’t say a lot when my ego is in charge. It’s not like that. It can’t be bothered fighting for airtime with the wanker that is the ego. It knows that arguing with the ego wastes time and energy. It waits until my ego has been knocked off for the day before saying, “Oi! Pssst! Listen up! I’ve got some questions”.
It asks me if I’m happy with how I conducted myself that day. Am I proud of myself? Did I live my day in accordance with my values? Did I try to help someone who needed it today, or did I intentionally avoid situations where I might be expected to help others?
My conscience knows the truth. You can’t lie to your conscience. I tried to anyway, but it was pointless. I’ve spent extended periods of time throughout my life flat refusing to have the conversation with my conscience because I knew it was right. I knew I was doing so many of the wrong things, but I just couldn’t muster the energy to do anything about it. I just wanted to wallow in my own fucking misery. Deflect all blame onto everyone else. Play the victim, let my ego convince me that I was hard done by and that I could do nothing about anything. That’s right where my ego wants me to be. Ripe for the picking.
My ego manifests in many ways. I have a lot of different names for it. It is the addict in me; It’s the guy who justified going on four-day benders with a pregnant partner at home. It’s the voice that tells me to keep eating junk food when I’m overfull. It’s the voice that used to say to me that buying more cocaine at 4 am on a Sunday morning is a good idea. It tells me to have just one more drink before bed on a school night, another ten times. It lt allowed me to lay there on a Monday morning and believe that I never wanted to do this shit again, only to swoop in later in the week and talk me into doing the same shit yet again, convincing me along the way that my partner won’t mind or that I’ll be able to talk my way out of it yet again.
The only way for me to put my ego aside is to boost my self-esteem, but how the fuck do you do that? It’s definitely not as simple as it sounds.
I’ve spent thousands of dollars and countless hours in the offices of psychologists and psychiatrists to get to the bottom of why I felt the way I felt, drank the way I drank and used drugs the way I used drugs. I love seeing my psychologist, and I see her once a month, whether things are good, bad or indifferent.
However, I would always leave an appointment frustrated that whoever I had just seen hadn’t really given me anything tangible I could walk away and practice. My brain worked in a way where everything was transactional. I wanted someone to tell me to go and do this thing, which requires that much effort to achieve this equal and measurable result. But of course, it doesn’t work like that.
So what do you do?
The only way to rebalance that sea saw of self-esteem and ego is to live in a way where I consider how difficult that conversation with my conscience before I sleep every night will be.
It’s hard work, but by surrounding myself with like-minded people and immersing myself in sobriety, I am slowly considering how my daily actions will impact my conversation with my conscience each night. Before making a decision, I try to stop, think and consider how those actions will affect that conversation with my conscience before I go to sleep that night.
It’s hard work, and I’m not good at it. Slowly, though, through practice, I’m slowing down and making more and more of the right decisions throughout the day, which takes power away from my ego. It helps me have that conversation with my conscience. The conversation is much lighter and easier to digest because I have done fewer things that don’t align with my values to process each night.
Every night when that conversation is easy, and I can genuinely say that I did more things that align with my values than things that don’t, my self-esteem takes a boost, and that sea saw tips further and further into the side of good healthy self-esteem.
I don’t expect myself to be perfect. I expect myself to try. I expect myself to make progress and improve, but I have learned that I need to stop expecting so much from myself and never expect perfection. That leads to a letdown.
I can’t think my way into feeling better about myself. I can’t think my way into a higher view of myself. I can’t plan to go out for some massive good deed and expect it to make me feel some way. Doing something with a predetermined outcome in my mind will only lead to resentment when I don’t get the exact result I envisaged. That is, doing things, as kind as they are, for the wrong reasons and resentments, hurt me far more than the person I’m resentful of.
All I can do is wake up each day and see what kind of shit sandwich life throws at me and try to make the right decision about each shit sandwich as it comes to me.
That’s where I’m going to get self-esteem from.
Cheers Wankers.
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