The Tyranny of Damaged Ego

 

The Tyranny of Damaged Ego.

The misunderstanding of self.

Who we perceive ourselves

to be when compared with the

societal expectations placed upon

us by others or what we expect of ourselves

in a social setting.  

 

Classic Ego, Freud would say, was just

your conscious mind and how you

distinguished yourself from others.

This is “me”; That is “you”.

Yet, it seems to this conscious mind;

Ego is easily corrupted.

 

Corrupted by childhood traumas,  

accidents, punishments, embarrassments,

jokes gone awry, lies we tell ourselves to feel

better, beliefs we clung to despite being proven false,

and perhaps not being understood by the people that

are supposed to understand us.

 

That damage, causing a misrepresentation

of ourselves, to ourselves, leading to feelings

of inadequacy, failure, fear, panic, anxiety,

depression, and long-winded poems about

one’s sense of self in very trying and

emotional times.

 

Damaged Ego is a tyrant.

Ruling over the hemispheres of our

minds like some golden idol from history,

bent on total domination through

the tactics of, suspicion, division and doubt.

 

A smiling tyrant wielding a globus cruciger

as we wander in the no man’s land of

self-pity and self-incrimination, searching

for some normalcy in the ever-pitched battle

between me and mine.

A tyrant to be defied often, even defeated.

 

Defeated and defied, buried away, giving room

for the true self: the happy, go-lucky, self-satisfied

person I want to be. The genuine me who I want to be

when not in the throes of some exasperated emotional

state brought on by the most infinitesimal of troubling events.  

 

That Damaged Ego Tyrant, buried for a time

in a tomb, unearthed and revived occasionally,

by some bumbling archaeologists who knew not

what they were doing.  Unleashing something

like a cursed Mummy, set to take revenge on those

who woke it from its slumber.

Rising up from the dust, to start the battle again,

over and over.

 

We mange our perceptions of self as

best we can I suppose. We fight the tyranny

of the damaged ego.

We falter, we eulogize, we apologize,

we cry, we laugh, we struggle, we fight on.

Always hoping that after each battle,

the misunderstanding of ourselves is

lessened.