A Brief History of My Ego

My ego began early, as soon as I was born an only child. Before I could speak, I already knew that there was a mold, it was broken after I was born, the whole town knew about it, and that was that.

Growing up, I could pretty much have everything I wanted, as long as my wishes fell into the parameters of a third world economy, because I grew up in the Philippines. For example, I could have all the rice I wanted, unless it was being rationed that week, and then I couldn’t. During those times I would trick myself into wanting powdered milk, because there was an unlimited supply of powdered cows.

Around the age of 6, my ego told me to ask for piano lessons. Without my parents’ knowledge, in broken english I had asked the nun on the 6th floor of my elementary school to teach me piano. A week later, I came home with a note pinned to my white uniform shirt that asked my parents to pay for the piano lessons. So they did. And my ego said, “This is cool. Now ask for a piano.”

By the time I was 7, my ego was at Batman level. I had gadgets and toys and a third world country piano. But that was shortlived, because I had to leave Batman in the old country to come to the new country, America. My ego knew that in order to blend into the new environment, it had to assume a more docile persona, more like Clark Kent. I had to relearn english because, even though the natives couldn’t spell or write very well, their accents sounded as if they knew what they were talking about. They said my name as if there were only twenty letters in the alphabet. And that confused my ego. But as soon as the straight A’s arrived, my ego got back on track.

My ego was on an academic, I’m-gonna-be-an-engineer autopilot mode all through grade school and middle school. But halfway through high school, my ego discovered poetry, then girls who liked poetry, then the magic of the rock group Journey. During a creative writing class with Miss Rueweller, a “Tall drink o’ water” as my History teacher called her, I wrote a haiku that made some girl in the class go, “ooh.” Suddenly, my ego didn’t want to be an engineer anymore. It wanted to write songs and poems and draw, and do other many things that have made other egos go poor and become drunks in later years.

My ego didn’t want to be an engineer through the rest of high school and the first two years of college, but it went through the motions anyway. My ego didn’t care enough to get good grades. My ego hadn’t been introduced to bliss yet. And then, during the fall semester of 1990, my ego met bliss. Bliss comprised of four classes: Voice class, Rapid Visualization Drawing, Poetry Writing, and Short Story Writing. I got straight A’s in all of them. It was the most effortless semester of my life.

But just like the Batman year, this bliss was quickly gone. After graduating from college, my ego traveled from one path to another, trying to find that one road, trying to find bliss again. And knowing that it didn’t want to be pureed into oblivion forever and ever, my ego didn’t settle for a well-paying but fluorescent-lit office existence. My ego told me that it wanted to eat creativity and take naps in between meals, that there’s actual money to be made by eating creativity and napping in between meals. So I fed it by working at home, with little snacks of consulting jobs and a whole lot of naps.

During a psychedelic episode in 1994, my ego told me to drop everything and design web sites. All the other egos told my ego that it was stupid, what the hell do people need web sites for. My ego didn’t listen. Like Van Gogh, my ego is deaf in one ear.

But my ego was right. This “web site” thing was the real deal, and my ego swam in it, reveled in it, rejoiced, napped, cashed checks and bought unecessary trendy objects with it.

Then, in 1997, my ego died. Buddhism killed it.

But I have a feeling it’s not really dead. I think my ego wants me to think it’s dead, but it’s really waiting in the shadows. I can feel it sometimes, whenever I think about an Armani jacket, whenever I stare at a Victoria’s Secret commercial, whenever I long for washboard abs. It’s there, waiting for me to find bliss. Waiting for me to introduce it again to bliss, waiting for that reunion.