“The first half of life is dedicated to forming a healthy ego. The second half is about going inward and letting it go- Carl Jung”
And here we sit… The backdrop for my last 2 blogs was the Covid 19 pandemic, as I write this one, we are still sitting in lock down. It is likely this will continue for then months to come. The egoic walls are crumbling down and society is left scrambling for the shreds of its identity which can get assembled. Jobs have been lost. Nails and hair cannot be done. Distractions are not as readily and easily available. It is stating the obvious to say that this is a challenging time for everyone. Something I have observed from amongst many of my peers, aged between 33 and up is that this process is seemingly more gruelling for the millennial generation. We are the ADD generation. We thrive on instant gratification. We get bored quickly. We require frequent praise and validation. We are the selfies generation. Psychologist would call many of us narcissists.
I started my journey of ego destruction last year and gosh it wasn’t fun. I had been working for a company that didn’t value me and left me feeling very anxious about my future. I was responsible for bringing in sales, in a competitive industry. Either their rates were not competitive, or I am useless at what I do and trust me I often asked myself that question. Stressing about my job security didn’t help my performance either. Apart from that I had nerve damage from a botched wisdom tooth extraction which was too close to my nerve, leaving me with a skew mouth. Being a former model, this took its toll on my self-worth which had previously been closely tied to my appearance. I was still unmarried and without kids at the age of 32, this is a big deal in South African culture. At that stage I was in a relationship with someone who left me feeling that I was someone who was very hard to love. He refused to say he loved me frequently. He would say it once a week under duress and would spend a large portion of our relationship being rather cold and cruel to me. This was difficult for me, as I now understand I am someone who has always had an anxious attachment style. Anxious attachment is one of four types of attachment styles. People who have an anxious attachment style may have a hard time feeling secure in relationships. This is common for people who come from divorced parents, where typically both parents were not frequently attentive to the child during its formative years. There is a great article on it in Psychology today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/compassion-matters/201904/how-anxious-attachment-style-affects-relationships
While it may seem that an anxiously attached person would seek out someone who was nurturing and available, oftentimes they wind up being drawn to a person with an avoidant attachment style who has trouble meeting their emotional needs.
The relationship ended and I left the company that I was working for. I became aware of my anxious attachment style, which allowed me to understand my unhealthy patterns and the role I had played in the demise of my romantic relationships. I eventually grew tired of obsessing over my skew mouth. I had been desperately seeking self-acceptance, security and self-love in all the wrong places. I was exhausted. The more I needed a great paying job and status, the more I needed to be gorgeous and receive confirmation of that. The more I needed a reassuring partner, the more it eluded me. Furthermore, I realized that even if I had those things it would never be enough. I would never be enough. Whilst my ego was the master the goal posts would always be shifted. The remedy could not be sourced externally. I learnt through a psilocybin mushroom trip, which I am quite certain I mentioned in a previous blog, that the answer to all my problems lay in simply connecting to my higher self. My higher self is the God that lives within me, within us all. The higher self is connected to all that there is. The void I had spent my life feeling was just the space between my ego and my higher self and the more I tried to fill it with stuff, the greater the space became.
So now I get it and it is not easy, but this awareness has brought me a lot of peace. I still experience rejection and feel inadequate or fearful at times, but I can see those emotions for what they are. They are visitors that will come and then go. They don’t form part of me. My mind will still go to dark places, but I also realize that I am not my mind. It all begins and ends in the mind. I can choose what I give attention to and yes, I still give attention to the wrong things. But I now understand that those bad decisions do not define me either. I am infinitely more than a societal label or egoic construct. Regardless of what happens I am enough; I have always been enough. I am the universe manifested in human form. The irony in understanding this is that I have never been more eager to be of service to my fellow man than ever before. I realize I am not here to further my own agendas but rather to enable in my own small way, the greater good of the collective. I am here to love. When I am making choices that are out of alignment with the greater good of the collective, I feel that I suffer. I have disconnected from my higher self and the void returns, I feel alone. The beauty is that when this happens, I need to forgive myself, give myself love and start again. Tomorrow is a new day. We aren’t on earth to be perfect; we are perfect, and perfection is where we will return.
Soul Food 