My Nemesis

There is a problem I suffer from after completing each piece of work. The problem is my ego. I have to wrestle with it. And wrestling with my ego is tough. As tough as it would be to convince a 10 foot gorilla to lie down and surrender his last banana.

Do I always win?

Nope

But I win most of the time… at least enough to continue working on new pieces.

The battle I have is trying to live up to my personal expectations with every new piece I produce.

There is this little voice that somehow finds itself in my head all too often, and this voice is somewhat a pain in the ass.

The voice, the super-ego, tells me, “Hmmm, you know something… that painting looks kinda okay. Not bad actually.”

Then the voice breaks into a little chuckle – I freaking hate the chuckle!

And then he continues his rant…

“But here’s the thing…(he always starts the second sentence with “here’s the thing” – I hate that too)…

“I’m sensing that you are out of juice buddy boy. I think it will be very tough to exceed that kind of quality in another painting. Err… I just don’t think you got it in you”.

And this is the very point where I think to myself…

If my ego were a real person, I’d scrub the toilet with his toothbrush. If my ego were a real person…I’d wear one pair of socks everyday for 10 weeks and then stuff them in his pillowcase.

If my ego were a real person…I’d wash his boxer shorts in poison ivy…I’d take to his umbrella with a hole puncher.

If my ego were a real person, I’d stuff his shower curtain rod full of prawns. It’ would take him weeks to find out where the smell was coming from.

But of course, carrying out these types of revenges would simply use up too much of my creative energy – energy that could be better spent on starting a new painting.

My latest personal piece, the portrait of my father, was quite an intensive project. In all it took around 3 weeks before I eventually managed to capture the whole concept that had been living inside my minds eye.

So while I sometimes think that if my ego were a real person I would fill it’s life full of paybacks and nasty pranks, I have gotten better at accepting it’s existence.

Our egos are always going to challenge us. Our egos are always going to lead us to believe that we need to have something that we don’t actually need to have at all.

Our egos have a funny way of creating that kind of frustration in us all at times.

While we all want to get better at being who we are and what we do, we don’t want to be dragged there by the earlobe – which is what an ego that is off the leash and running wild can often do.

I’m better at dealing with the ego these days.  I don’t have to wrestle with it as much as I used to.

To be one step ahead of your ego, get excited and inspired by your minds’ silence, fall in love with the act of creating new work and try to avoid establishing strict starting points and finishing points in your work. The ego will often drag you past the point of the piece feeling wholesome; which is the point where you should have stopped.

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