“Very often we are our own worst enemy as we foolishly build stumbling blocks on the path that leads to success and happiness.”
-Louis Binstock
In a society where success is measured mostly through celebrity or notoriety, it can seem futile to have any reason to keep pushing. We formulate this idea in our heads that if we become more like someone else, our lives will instantly become better. In turn, we create stop signs for ourselves based on these others people's wants and needs, or worse, what we assume are their wants and needs.
Does anyone else think this is fucked?
First, a story. I spent the last 72 hours with a couple dozen of the most important people in my life. Noteworthy. That is not some title I'm giving for this situation, but the people. I mean that both psychically and metaphorically.
Noteworthy, an a cappella group in Boston's Emerson College (where I attended and received a unimaginably expensive piece of paper that I keep next to my wigs...) is without a doubt one of the most important facilitators in my constant evolution. It's been like viagra for my heart and soul.
We have shared more than just music: love, anger, loss, laughter, death and creation. I tell others in my life who don't know any of the members of Noteworthy about my feelings, and there is always some sense of loss in their eyes. This weekend proved to me that even I wasn't fully aware of the power a tight nit family could have. It took tears, a lot of booze, an accordion, a yoga mat and some simple words for me to articulate to myself how important these people really are.
What does this have to do with anything? Simple. I allowed these people a brief responsibility for my well-being and took ownership of the fact that I still had self-worth issues. A definition, then explanation.
Freud defines the ego as "part of the personality that mediates the demands of the id, the superego and reality. The ego prevents us from acting on our basic urges (created by the id), but also works to achieve a balance with our moral and idealistic standards (created by the superego)."
Freud's definition describes how we protect ourselves. If some bitch stole my man, the Id will want me to cut her. The Super-Ego will tell me that it is against societal standards to cut bitches. The Ego is like your own personal Judge Judy; weighing in both sides and coming up with some weird analogy to rationalize the fact that she makes boatloads of money. It's how we make decisions.
The problem with the Ego is its relationship to the Super-Ego. "Societal Standards" are an intangible waste of crap in our brains because it is primarily subjective. Somewhere along our own personal Great Expectations, we make up rules for life. These rules are based on three partials: The things we know, the things we are told and the things we assume.
The things we know are law. Going back to bitch cutting, we know that’s wrong because it would put us in jail.
The things we are told are normative. Enough people agreed on this idea that I have to assume it is right. All of my friends told me it would be wrong to cut Becky’s throat, and so it must be.
The things we assume are correlative. A new instance has arisen wherein we use prior experience and knowledge to ascertain what the right course of action is. My biffles told me it was wrong to cut Becky, so I have to assume stealing her man is also bad because she would have the same murderous thoughts that I currently have.
Having an ego allows us to be decisive, but it also allows for false standards to creep into our brain's party even though no invitations were given. By creating a majority of our decision based on other people’s ideas or what we think their reaction will be can misrepresent what options we want for ourselves. The most successful people are the ones who do it their way, like Burger King suggests. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t base his civil rights movement on how he thought a majority of the people would react. He calculated everything on the values and standards he had created for himself.
Beyonce introduces a different ego in her song…”Ego”- "Usually I'm humble, right now I don't choose. You can leave with me or you could have the blues. Some call it arrogant, I call it confident. You decide when you find on what I'm working with"
This is what Skynet declares is the bad ego. We are taught to judge people who seem too confident and think that the rules don’t apply to them. Perhaps it is instead that they do not apply themselves to these rules. Beyonce wouldn’t be fiercing it up on stage if she hadn’t created a set of rules and standards that she applied to on a daily basis.
This is not to say that other people’s opinions of you and what you do are invalidated. On the contrary, it is paramount to hear these ideas when contemplating your own. The difference lies in looking at it objectively. Do these thoughts fall in alignment with my the ones you've created for yourself? If yes, keep these people in your life at all costs. If not, a metaphorical bitch cutting session may be necessary.
Reenter Noteworthy. We have this great big field to do with as we like and we collectively decided that it would be a great idea to play wiffleball. I preface this with having the absolute worst confidence in anything baseball-like from the years that I was forced to play in little league.
At the tender age of eight, I was “bad at sports” because I told myself I was bad at sports. I had done this because I was chubby and based my declaration on the words of other, meaner kids who decided I couldn’t be good at sports if I was overweight. I also knew, somewhere in the depths of my head, that I was gay. Both society and myself are to blame for thinking that being gay determined a falsehood of me being even worse at sports. Sports are considered masculine and being homosexual, for whatever reason, is not. I’m not sorry to say this. You have to be pretty fucking manly to have sex with dudes.
Over the years and like many others before, I had created this dichotomy for myself that tried to fall under normal manlier stereotypes so that the gay side would be put into balance. I could never be too much of one so as not to offend the other. This kept me from being me.
Back on the field. I made a comment that I was bad and that I would be picked last, which is what obviously happened. In our first game, I never struck out and I always made good contact with the ball. I had proven to myself and everyone else that I actually didn’t suck. But I had made the normative that I should be picked last because I’m bad at sports because I’m gay. Are you starting to see how crazy this is?
Second game. Not only was I picked last again, but I also played even better the second time. I scored the winning homerun.
What it comes down to is that I enabled people who love and respect me to put me in a place that I had decided I belonged based on ideas that I assumed they had made up about me and people like me because of things I had heard and seen before.
So….ego….you effectively helped me to lose all gratitude for myself and the things I have to offer with people that really matter.
This story does have a happy ending though.
We had done yoga earlier in the day. I had never down it before this, and had no idea what I was missing out on. It loosened me up a lot for the rest of the day. I'm also pretty sure it was what allowed my body to overcome the idea that I was bad at baseball.
And then there was Greg. Greg is one of the quintessential members of Noteworthy. He is more assured and confident of who he is and what he wants than any other person I’ve met. Just hours before our late night conversation, Greg performed in drag while playing the accordion and singing Katy Perry’s firework like it was a Wagnerian Opera.
I went to Greg after feeling shitty about myself for who even knows what reason and he simply said, “Brian you’re a Queen. I’m a Queen. We are part of the people who make differences. We have so much to offer”
For me, Greg wasn’t calling me a pansy or saying anything defamatory about being gay. He was calling us royalty.
Strip this down to the bare essentials. We need to be like Beyonce and affirm to ourselves that we are the most important person in our universe. Finding the people that encourage this kind of thinking for us are the people we need to cherish, to help us regain that gratitude for just how important we all are.
I’m just extra lucky because I have like 35 other people in one group that will always do this for me.
LOVE AND STRUGGS
B DANN
PS - The main kid who bullied me in Elementary School was Erectile Dysfunction. Tell me Karma doesn't exist.
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