D's Ego

Note: This is my worst article, couldn’t put it any better. The inspiration himself though intriguing is a scumbag. Just had to write it for reasons associated with closure. But then, it’s my blog after all!!

This is a story about people who, in their ego, find it so hard to accept competition and failures that they’d much rather alter their lives than subject it to penitence and apology.

This is a story about someone named D.

D was very notorious yet popular and admired when he was in school. He knew every body there and was comfortable being what he chose to be. He had no shortage of friends, the ones who understood and accepted him for his flaws, whereas everybody else was in awe of his strapping and gregarious personality. He loved his friends with a degree of loyalty that summons salutation, and they returned it equally sustained. He had the Innocent and impish manner of a child, who was protected by the ‘wall’ of his dear ones.

When he began college, it was the first time he had ever been in an entirely new-fangled environment which was absolutely oblivious to him. His past had not educated or cultured him for this possibility. But, being bright and fiercely avaricious (for lost popularity), he soon got the attention he deserved.

He was handsome and outgoing. Ego and assertion were justly expected of him.

But this is where his malevolent traits found the better of him. His ego ‘subjugated’ him not only to dominance (endurable by people who knew him) but to condescension and pomposity.

This, as I call it, was the turning point for him.

People with more control over their Ego would have found an amiable way out of the tribulation. But D Chose to stay put. All he ever had in his life was his Ego and his friends who ‘respected’ him for that.

I lost contact with him for a year after that, but this is what I know of him now.

D wasn't good at making lasting impressions on people. He wasn’t popular outside his small circle of friends. Other people, who were less admired than him in school, flared brilliantly in college, but D got left behind. His personality did not allow for him to feel jealousy or regret, nor did it allow him amends. He couldn’t accept the fact that he needed to control his ego. He couldn’t allow himself to be jealous of the same people he had patronized. All he could do was change his area of expertise and his audience.

D chose to completely shut out that part of his life. He wouldn’t consent to comparison, at his loss. So he changed what he wanted. He didn’t want love or any form of recognition as a lover. He decided he got enough of that from his old long gone friends. If some one did offer him that, he would reject it without thought. He could be second to no one. He pronounced every thing he didn’t have ‘unworthy’ and ‘undesirable’.

“A pit of snakes.”

D put all his devotion to his career and education. People said, he was meant for great things and would become a great professor some day. People who barely knew him and were just being cordial. He convinced himself that nobody’s love was good enough for him and that he wasn’t good enough to love anybody back. He felt love as an emotion would just be an obstacle to his new found aim.

He didn’t take risks because he feared rejection.

He never understood that love and tenderness would have not only made him what he is now, but so much more than that.

There are some people, who have an undeterred faith on their ego and a firm belief that no matter how flawed and iniquitous their actions might be, they have reason to believe it justified.

What I have observed from my interaction with such people is that they have an inability to feel emotions such as jealousy, regret, shame, sorrow, guilt and denial. All they primarily feel is ego and to some extent, vicarious hatred. This inevitably leads them to their own downfall.