Indie Love - Flight of the Ego

Everyone has one, and if you are looking for love, or trying to keep it, you’re negotiating 2 egos at the very least, so I think it’s worth thinking on. If you’re an indie artist, all the more so - focusing on your own creation all the time, scrounging hard to make a living from it every day, can create powerful ego effects.

Ego is not just about thinking you’re great and irritating your roommates. I think it’s only maybe half about the highs, and the other half is the less visible, more prevalent, ego low. You’re still the center of the world, but it’s not a good thing. Ego swings your universe on the hinge of a mistake in perspective (paying attention to yourself too much) and it’s a love killer.

1 example from my own life:

A boy I loved (in a way) broke up with me. He had sincere reasons, quietly painful things in his own life, but the sound of being broke up with was so loud in my ears, I couldn’t hear what he was going through, what he told me explicitly, until years had passed. If I had heard it in the moment, the conversation would have gone differently.

Hearing is not a simple matter of transmission, emotion affects how we think of ourselves, what we can take in, and how we process. I was young, and apparently young people experience these jolts of stultifying brain juice more intensely then adults (you may have noticed,) especially adults who’ve learned to notice, so I don’t beat myself up about that particular past ego dumb move. We’re friends again a decade later, so it’s ok, still I try to remember and point it out: the fact of feeling pain, or being surprised, or feeling shock, or sorrow, or worrying about whether your the best or the worst in the room, does literally affect our ability to sense and think, especially to think about others.

And if you don’t think about the one you love, they disappear.

It’s relativity or something.

I don’t think of ego anymore as something to try and get rid of, but as a voice to notice, a set of waves to learn to ride, a haze to learn to see through (and breath through.) Nobody gets it perfect, we all muddle along and it’s worth it to get to the interesting people on the other side.

Understanding how ego affects you, and looking kindly on it when it shakes your partner(s), trying to talk, or you know, sing your way through it, whatever works for you, will ease much of the tension in love, potentially provide hilarious stories for later, and might even make the singles scene slightly less scary.

(We’re watching Flight of the Conchords now, can you tell?)