In 1991, I stumbled across the book Coming to Life: Traveling the Spiritual Path in Everyday Life by Polly Berrien Berends. These words caught my eye, and I was shocked. I was forty-two at the time.
“At the age of forty, one man was astonished to realize that he still looked at everyone as his parent–even the supermarket cashier girl. He didn’t just want her to make change and pack his bags. Instead, he realized, he was doing everything he could to get her special attention, approval, affection, admiration, and encouragement. Even before his turn came in line, he was hoping she would notice how handsome he was in his new shirt, how pretty his wife and child were. My, she should think, hasn’t he done well for himself? He caught himself winking, gesturing, posturing, shrugging, and fawning at this seventeen-year old… He was appalled. How could he be so childish? He figured he must be nuts.”
At the time, I thought, “Man, that�s pretty damn close to some of the crap that goes on in my head every day.” And I was relieved to find out that the author considered this goofball thinking to be pretty common. Slowly it began to dawn on me that there was a constant stream of these little thoughts running through my head. And that their mission was to get me to have what I started calling an ego orgasm.
An ego orgasm is whatever I do or happens in life that I think gives me a psychological boost but that turns out to be false. Mistaken. Often times destructive. And once it’s over, unless I see the mistaken thinking behind it, the hunger for another one quickly returns.
“Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.” – Casey Stengel
Likewise, it’s not so much that having an ego orgasm itself is hard on my psyche. It’s the preoccupation with trying to having one that exacts a toll.
This weblog is a way for me to build a list of my ego orgasms, past and present. Writing about them seems to minimize their power to fuck me up.
If some of mine sound familiar to you, maybe that’ll help you get your shit together just a little more. And then I’ll be happy and have a little ego orgasm to celebrate. heh.
If you have a story to tell about one of your own ego orgasms, I’d like to hear it. Use the Contact form on my Real Joe site to tell me about it. Let me know if I can use it here and whether you want me to attribute it to you.