On Happiness and the Ego

My emotions can go up and down in a matter of seconds, like a bumpy road or a rollercoaster ride. Usually I just feel OK. And more often I just feel like rain drops, always falling down. How fast or slow, heavy or soft, depending on the cloudiness within.

I truly believe that there is no memory worth forgetting, but then again, there are times that I wish I can just forget. To wake up and find that you’re a clean slate, tabula rasa style, so that I can be born again with no innate or built-in mental content, so that all my experiences of the outside world, and who I was, disappears. Would I become the same person? Will I have this same personality? Will my values remain unchanged?

If you took Psychology class, which is one of my favorite subjects in school, you might remember the word ego. What is ego? Ego is the self that has been modified by the external world. It’s the scars that have been left on you, ugly marks that cover up who you really are. It’s the little things, those little events that characterizes you, what you did, what you said, what you didn’t do. Your likes, dislikes, loves, and hatreds. It’s your history that you can’t let go of. They are your memories, your hopes and dreams. They determine your habits, hobbies and mannerisms. All of this makes up your ego, your identity.

Memories of being hit, being abandoned, being stifled, not being able to express your emotions, being different, being forgotten, being insignificant, being ugly, being alone, being compared, being useless, never being good enough, being pathetic all adds to your ego. It governs how you react or adapt in the present.

Internally, it’s turmoil. It’s a gray landscape, hard dirt, with a lone crow flying, cawing, with tumbleweeds, a skeleton of a shrub, caught against a barbed fence interlacing the dreary place.

Uneasiness and confusion, it’s a disorder that I can’t put my hands on. My mind wanders, my eyes turn blank, and I start seeing things that are no longer there. If my heart can be illustrated, it’s like living in an oil painting with thick, hard frames. All that I can see, all that I can be, is limited within those frames.

I guess in a way I’ve come to realize that it could be an identity problem. An identity crisis. A war between what I am, my core essence, and what I’ve become.

I’m always doing a lot of research on the Internet and reading books, hoping that someday I’ll find a reason for feeling like this. It’s as though I just want to find whether there is something wrong, an illness, a slight chemical imbalance, a name to it, or whether I just work and think this way.