Ego, self-discovery, and self-love
Children live almost entirely in their bodies, feeling and grasping and experiencing the world directly: eating when hungry, playing when bored, sleeping when tired, crying when in pain, laughing when happy.
As we grow into adult participants of society, we protect ourselves by constructing and donning a suit of armor: ego. There is a danger however of ego's anxious, malevolent spirit possessing us — so insidiously that we confuse it for our real self. Each blow that dents our armor then also seems to chip away at us, until we lose sight of our selves entirely and become clanking, hollow knights on misguided quests of self-discovery.
But self-discovery is a false, misleading goal, since our selves are right where they have always been: right here in our bodies, right where we are! What we really need to seek and develop instead is self-love.
Self-love is finding the courage to step out of our armor to once again just feel the breeze on our skin, the grass beneath our feet, the touch of another person's hand. Self-love is recovering the trust we used to have in ourselves, the joy we used to experience spontaneously and naturally just being and doing in the world, unweighted by emotional baggage, mental cruft, complicated defense mechanisms.
Self-love is realizing that underneath all these layers of mangled metal and battle scars we are still the same tender, fragile babies we have always been — and so we still, and always will, deserve unconditional, newborn love1.
Armed with self-love instead of ego, we can quest in a much richer and more joyful arena, and seek to discover not merely our selves, but other people and the world all around us.
This essay is part of a month-long series of 30 essays.