Conceit or Ego
or
Both
A conceit is a type of metaphor, a comparison of two unlike things for the purpose of creating an extended meaning. For instance, “Life is a bowl of cherries” is a conceit that tells us several things about the nature of life. It is sweet and delicious, but it doesn’t last forever.
Someone’s ego is their sense of their own worth.
With those definitions out of the way, I have been giving a lot of thought as to why I have felt compelled, driven even, pushing myself to achieve this faltering goal of an autobiography. My story. I have felt internally, all along, that this compulsion was, and is, an ego-driven conceit. It has niggled at my core, a lot. Even though people who know more than I have repeatedly told me, based on articles, stories, and tales I have put forth, that I have book that needs to be put down.
After a relatively sleepless night of tossing and turning, in the sheets and in my mind, I kept wondering why. Why I had this need to reconcile my past with my present. To what end? Everyone has a story. Many stories. Each of our lives are packed full of individual sights, sounds, and experiences that we each hold as unique, somehow more worthy than another person’s same reflections on their lives.
That is Ego
Thinking that mine are more worthy, more interesting, more insightful, than other people’s?
That is Conceit
So, at my age, 72, why would my life’s tapestry be of interest to anyone else save for the occasional trotting out of sordid or scintillating tales at cocktail parties? If I really admit the truth, my supposed need for validation through the complete telling of my life’s tale is really a toxic blend of Ego and Conceit. Put a pin in that.
Balloon Burst
Night thoughts are the worst. They slink into the room like shadows of doom, intent on filling our heads with terrors and traumas and a million “what ifs”. That is where sayings like “It’s always darkest before the dawn” come from. “Every cloud had a silver lining”. Pablum to assuage our innermost fears. In truth, things really DO look better in the light of day. I am not sure what the relationship of darkness and light really entails or means. This is not my focus.
To write or not to write? That is my focus.
The Dark Night of the Soul
During a dark night of the soul:
- You lack energy.
- You feel more melancholy and sadness.
- You feel detached from your daily life.
- You feel like you no longer belong in your life.
- You notice that your thoughts become intrusive or very present.
- You feel lost, without a goal, you cannot project yourself into the future.
Cindy Theodore
Nailed it.
While typically this applies to a crisis of faith, one’s dark night is really something common to all of us at various times. It occurred to me last night that my motivator for years now has not been the need to write a book. In reality, it has been a deeper, more intimate need, more exposing than a tell-all book. My motivator throughout my life has been loss. My dark nights are filled with remembrances of all those people, places, and things, feelings even, that I have lost. Not that we don’t all have so many losses, both tragic and temporal. Fleeting and filamental. They are woven into the fabric that we wrap our personalities in every day. Put on a happy face.
I have always had a depressive side, one that I fastidiously hide from view. Embarrassed? Ashamed? How can I, who have been blessed with so much, so many trappings of happiness, even think to feel morose?
Shit Happens
And this, the shit that happens to us, is actually in the past. It happened. It is over, and like the dark nights we all experience, we move on in the daylight that always follows.
But We Don’t
Not completely. A small ionic bit of that shit, those traumas, embeds itself into our DNA. The part of us we keep to ourselves but the part that truthfully influences our day to day lives, moods, decisions, and actions more than we realize, or will admit to.
Therapy Helps
But the real work of healing is ours alone to complete. Therapy opens a few windows and doors, but we have to have the courage to walk through them, let the storm clouds wash over us, and have hope that by facing them down, we will see that brighter dawn the homily promises us. It is work. It is ongoing. It is life.
I removed myself from my life
I set a goal; come to Italy for two months, find a place to feed my soul and write my story. I dove in straight away, pounded out thousands of words, retelling the “real” story of my birth and childhood. I was going great guns…….until I realized after almost 10,000 words I had gotten only to my third birthday. Shit. That happened. Thus was the root of my dark night. Who the fuck cares about any of this shit except me? This is a colossal waste of my time, and anyone’s time, who might actually choose to read it.
As I tossed and turned some more, I really was striving to figure out why I needed to tell these stories, to lay bare this need in me for public scrutiny. Was this altruistic? A cautionary tale for others? Was this the ultimate in cathartic upchucking? A purgative for my constipated conscious? Then, like a sunbeam though a storm cloud, I got it.
This was about Loss
and
Healing
I have had my fair share of therapy. Talking, ad infinitum, about my childhood, my past, and how in my present, I struggle to find balance. Almost without fail, two things have crystalized from all the various professionals I have spoken to over the years. In their collective, learned, opinions I am:
– “the most well-adjusted person” they have come across given my storm-tossed life
-I am a person who also has, by virtue of my forced optimism and iron resolve, a tremendous amount of PTSD, most of it unaddressed and unresolved.
For now, I will be holding my life as if it’s a crystal ball, in my hands, prizm-ing facets of light and dark out into the open so that I can pick and choose what seems relevant, now. Examine some. Discard others, Dispel myths. Enhance truths.
Stay Tuned.