Who am I without the ego? (Part I)

In truth, I don’t know who I am without my ego. And I want to apologize for taking such a long hiatus from blogging and creating. The issue at hand was that this topic stunted me. Made me realize that I am not without my ego because without it I’m not me.

To me, my ego isn’t a bad thing or something that I couldn’t live without but it was something that I never paid attention to. In the nuisance of my daily life, how I interacted with others— and with myself— my ego wasn’t something separate of me. It was me. It was woven into my very fabric of being and in trying to comprehend this topic I got lost. I misunderstood what my ego was, how it affects me, how it would impact my interactions with life; and it made me feel shitty. It made me feel like a failure; like I’d taken the ultimate test of life and got every single question wrong.

So all this to say, who am I without my ego? Not myself. Probably someone I wouldn’t like, definitely someone who is foreign to my very existence, but certainly not the person I look at in the mirror every day.

Attached below is the original post I’d written in hopes of gaining some clarity but truthfully it felt like word vomit. A amalgamation words and thought thrown together until what I thought was a competent conversation developed…. It didn’t.

Truth be told, the ego is something that confuses me to no end. Even in school the topic was so… daunting— always perceived as something negative and haughty or explained as a percentage of a person identity that needed reduced into oblivion.

At the mention of an ego, I immediately get this imagery of an iceberg or hear Beyoncé singing about a big ego (even though we ALL know what that song was about). Upon trying to research this topic and gauge what I wanted to say, I came up with next to nothing.

Originally, there was a tik tok that eloquently explained the point and it would been my driving factor. But like most things in the internet, it got deleted. The video, from what I could remember posed the question it “who are you without your ego” and I was so in awe because how in the world could anyone answer that. A lot of people can hardly identify who they are with their ego so to pose a question that’s so loaded with ambiguity almost felt like a crime.

To me, my ego was a persona of learned characteristic and traits that I’d gathered and cultivated to protect and shield myself throughout my twenty six years of being alive. Overall, my ego was my fears and hesitations that helped keep me locked away from other, in hopes that no one never really know who I was and couldn’t hurt me.

Upon looking deeper into the internet for guidance, the ego was listed as something that needed to be shed or die because it hindered your soul. Either being defined as “the one of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that serves as the organized conscious mediator between the person and reality especially by functioning both in the perception of and adaptation to reality” by Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Or even being called the {…}