The Ego, the Id, and Me

It is early morning and I awake remembering that I am only a few hundred feet away from the sea. I can hear the surf, but it is too cold to walk to the water. South Florida was suppose to be be a respite from the raw snowy cold of New England, and in some ways it was, but the temperature this morning is 28 and I am feeling cheated out of the warmth I came in search of.

I have to remember why I came here, and for the most part I do remember. I had decided that if writing was going to be my second career, I would have to pay as much attention to become a writer as I had paid to becoming a psychoanalyst. At first the thought was daunting because as I calculated my age and subtracted the amount of years i spent in education and in preparation for my current career, I was aware that I did not have that many years left.

Then I had a new thought, what if I just began to write. So about eighteen months ago I opened my first blog site through word-press. I was surprised at just how quickly the words appeared on the page. Once I had decided that i would be a writer, it seemed that the content took care of itself when ever I sat down to write. It felt more like taking dictation. I stopped worrying about grammar, and I stopped worrying about punctuation and run-on sentences and dangling participles. I let the muse of the day dictate to me.

Now coming from a profession where an exaggerated and inflated ego is the direction that we are going in rather than coming from, you need to realize just how big a jump it was for me to demand that my ego step aside in order to let the other me have the reigns. Let me tell you, the ego has a way of getting what it wants.

Do you remember the scene from the old movie, Odyssey 2001 Hal the computer in a soothing but commanding voice tells David not to shut down the computer..."you need me David, don't do that David, YOu will be sorry David--David, no----please no, no........." Do you remember the tone and the lack of cadence that was nearly hypnotic. Well, that is somewhat how my ego sounds when my more creative self want a hand at running things. It has a way of believing that what is good for it, is good for me. And I suppose in evolutionary biology that must have started out to be true But, it is no longer the case that an adult male ought to have to be told on a daily basis what is good and what is not good. By the time someone becomes and adult the ego ought to be retired.

I think of the ego as a strict nanny, who brought me up to do everything right and now that I am a grown man this poor nanny has nothing to do and it feels like it still needs to watch my every step. Well, if I was going to be successful as a writer the last thing that I needed was a nanny hanging onto my neck pulling and pushing at me in ways to have me proper. I was a proper psychoanalyst--well, most of the time. But essentially, my training in psychoanalysis would have to take a back seat because a writing career required an entirely different ethic.

The way I see it now is that I have become a writer and I have to take a series of steps that are not yet defined in order to become a published writer. Because were goal only to write--well, I do that already and I am successful at writing every day and I am even successful at getting my writing out to a limited audience. What I am looking for now is to write with the idea of publishing. It is now only a short leap. When I started this project of re defining myself--the distance between where I was and where i am now was much greater.

So, this is how I want to end this first verse and chapter about the new me. I have been successful at articulating that I am a writer, and I have been successful at writing. Now I need to add the discipline of writing with a purpose. Several hundred blogs later and some thirty articles published through Technorati has brought me to this sabbatical, by the sea, on a much, much too cold a day in the sub-tropics. I am here for a short season to escape the New England January and to once and for all remove my ego from my writing consciousness.

I am liking the results.........