The continued examination of myself has revealed a profound imperfection in who I am. I thought I was clear or almost clear of ego. The ego being the thing inside me that thought over and over and over and over again “I am me. I am me. I am what makes you me!” I think I have finally caught it.
I will attempt to list the ingredients of this recognition to make sense of where it comes from.
The post from a few days ago, about why I work so hard leads to this new thought process. I work for the plan. To make sure it happens. But that post didn’t get to the root of the issue, it was just the phenotype. It didn’t tell me why. It only showed what my underlying constituent parts resulted in. A man who does his work perfectly, on time, with good results and never fails. The plan goes perfectly, every time, without fail. Reliably.
I am never late. I never swear. I never get angry. I work hard. I never try to hurt people. I listen to authority. I drive at the speed limit. I have perfect credit. I have great marks. I do all my homework. I’m polite and well spoken. I’m quiet. I answer questions when asked. I take action when required. I follow rules.
I am, for all intensive purposes, perfect in my outwards appearance.
Now we get to what tipped me off. What got me to show my cards to myself? What is the chink in this armor of oddly perfect behavior?
I watch the show Dexter. It is about a character who is a blood analyst for a crime scene investigations unit in Miami. He is however, a serial killer who kills the people who get away from the police and are guilty of heinous crimes. Much of the show deals with him keeping up multiple facades to prevent the truth from ever being revealed.
The show resonates with me. I watch it and see a character who has a similar motivation to myself. Not that I kill people, but that I have a plan that requires perfection. Things have to be done. He has to do all sorts of ridiculous things to make sure that all of the elements of the major plan fall into place. And it isn’t just a small single pronged plan. He has to tend to all aspects of his life to make it all work. And it works because he has gotten very good at it.
And like no other show that I watch, I watch Dexter and feel a kinship for how he moves through life. He is protecting his life from complete and utter destruction of discovery. In his plan he assumes no failures or errors, because any would be disastrous. But now the question is what am I protecting with such ferocity? I am not some sort of serial killer, there is no grand secret which must not be revealed.
Thankfully I already knew the answer. I’ve known the words that describes it for a few years, but I’ve never been able to find it in myself with any conviction. It hid elusively behind layers of importance. I am protecting my ego. I’m protecting my own image of myself. My own conception of who I am. I am protecting the “me” that isn’t actually me. My ego wants to project to the world the image that I am a responsible and reliable person. My ego doesn’t want to be cool or liked. It doesn’t want to have power. It doesn’t simply want to be better than other people. It doesn’t want to be right.
My ego wants to portray itself as reliable and responsible. But the concept of reliability and responsibility is unrelenting to my ego, it requires perfection. My ego believes that to appear reliable and responsible, the facade must never be taken down. By its very definition reliability means consistency. My ego doesn’t allow for exceptions in reliability. It is a 100% game and is always played as such. And that is the reason for the plan. My ego built up over my lifetime a person who could make a plan that was as close to completely fool proof as possible.
I am not reliable or responsible. I appear to be. I appear so reliable and responsible that from all angles of observation, I am. Except of course from the inside. I don’t feel any motivation deeper than my ego for wanting to be responsible and reliable.
And now I am a little bit confused about what this means. I’ve again found myself at a point where I don’t know why I do what I do.
Thankfully I have read enough, thought enough and talked enough about these things that I know that everything will be okay. There is a reason that I say that science is my religion.
Kyler
4 comments:
Did you know that sometimes your credit is actually higher if you don't pay everything off on time? I'm like you, but it is a crazy system...
I have trouble buying the argument that "I am not reliable or responsible. I appear to be.". You are what you regularly do. If you always act reliable and responsible, you're reliable and responsible. Sorry.
You have found the place in this little essay where I was not able to be clear enough.
To rephrase it as bluntly as possible.
My thoughtfulness, respect and consideration for others is not for selfless reasons. I don't believe that I am fundamentally a virtuous or moral person. I am capable of being extremely selfish and self centered. The aspect of myself which prevents me from being self centered and morally bankrupt is my ego which is constantly attempting to create a perfectly reliable and responsible version of myself.
Now the catch-22 is that there is no evidence for what I am saying, as all of the evidence is external to myself in the form of my reliable and responsible actions. I can only describe what I think it happening on the inside. There is no way for anyone else to be sure.
I understand what you're saying, but I think you're making distinctions between "layers" of identity where none are called for. I mean, you can break down identity into as many little parts as you want. You could say that each section of the brain is its own person, they fight it out, and pretend to make a coherent person at the other end. But while that's a whimsical way of looking at things, it's totally unnecessary. When people meet you, they're not meeting the individual parts of the brain, they're meeting the overall person that the whole brain makes. And in the same way, I think it's arbitrary to say that the reliable persona you're creating for yourself is separate from the "real" you, because the only "you" that matters is the one other people meet. At that point it doesn't make any difference what your identity is made of, it's just your identity.
(I may be arguing against my own positions here, I'm not entirely sure.)
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