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I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase, “My ego is not my amigo”lately. It’s something I’ve heard from time to time in the rooms of recovery, but it seems like it would be a helpful phrase for almost everybody, whether they’re addicts or not.
It’s such a funny saying because on one hand, it sounds silly, like it’s a new Dr. Seuss book or something.
On the other hand, the more I contemplate it, the more it feels incredibly profound.
I talk about my ego quite a bit because it’s the source of lots of problems these days. One of my other favorite phrases in recovery is the idea that I have a huge ego and low self-esteem, and sometimes I can go back and forth from thinking “I should be President of the World” to “I suck at everything” in a span of about two minutes.
My ego is usually in the middle of everything. I do believe that I need to have an ego. How much? Should it be the same sized ego all the time? Do I have control over my ego? Those are complex questions that I don’t have the answers to. That’s way beyond my pay grade.
While I was contemplating those thoughts, I found a definition that said ego is the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious, and it is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity.
Whew. I don’t even know how to unpack all of that stuff. So I am not even going to try. But I think it’s a very interesting concept that my ego has an impact on the way I see both the world and myself. If I see myself as the most brilliant man on Earth, I’m probably going to end up viewing everything that happens around me through that lens.
Or when I think the opposite, that I should be launched into space on an interplanetary garbage hauler, I am probably going to be oozing self-pity and negativity to everybody and everything around me.
Which all brings me back to the original saying, that my ego is not my amigo. That’s an important thing for me to remember. My ego is a part of me. It’s important. I care about it. But it’s not my friend. It has its own goals and fears and insecurities, and they don’t always line up with mine.
That might sound so simplistic, and it kind of is. But in practical everyday life, it can really be hard to distinguish between me and my ego. When I think about it like one of many voices in my head and in my soul, it’s actually so much easier to treat my ego like something to consider, but maybe not something that has veto power over everything I think and do.
So if my ego isn’t my amigo, what is it? My first thought was, maybe it’s in the friends with benefits category but then it hit me how weird it would be to be hooking up with my own ego with no strings attached. So that doesn’t quite work.
I ultimately settled on the idea that my ego is not my ego… but I will consider it a close acquaintance and see how that goes.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
The optimist says, "My glass is half full."
The pessimist says, "My glass is half empty."
The alcoholic says, "Are you going to drink that?"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, July 2007, by Bill E. of Sitka, Alaska)
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