I Am My Own Troll

On waking up to chronic self-sabotage

This essay is strange. I’ve read it several times, and it only gets stranger. But it’s about a real experience, and I hope putting it to words will help combat a diabolical block. Maybe the images land; maybe they pass you by. Either way, thank you for being here.

In the last few years, I’ve been aware that I need to step away from my ego. This became clear the first time I encountered A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle—a gateway into present full-body awareness. Reading it back in 2006, when I was a massively undernourished and over-intellectualized college senior, I got this feeling: ahh, there’s a me that’s separate from this work, this weight, this plan for my life. Huh.

Unlike Tolle, I’ve not achieved ego-less presence. But I recently felt a prolonged distancing from my ego. It started a couple of weeks ago: I had the fragile yet invigorating sensation of living from my vulnerability. Instead of remembering to check in with my deeper self from time to time, I just was that self. It was glorious…until I became possessed.

This week, Saeed Jones quotes Tony Morrison’s Beloved in an essay about the coming of spring: “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” This feels especially true today, where the juxtaposition of the human experience has never been starker—we’ve got so much to be hopeful for and so much to grieve. It is perhaps not the ideal moment to lose one’s defenses.

After the initial detachment, I had a number of upside-down days when I felt taken over by a menacing troll. Oh my God, I have a demon inside of me, I thought. After its tiny sabbatical, my ingenious, acrobatic ego came roaring back, sensing the threat to its existence. I realized, observing this creature whipsaw my mind, that my ego is way smarter than I am. After years of being tended it’s also better developed than the parts of myself I actually like, which is a haunting irony. We think of our egos as self-aggrandizing; searching for praise and power. But mine is so sneaky, I didn’t notice it doing the cutting, incideous work of self-sabotage.

It is an exciting experience to recover a sense of who you are, apart from your ego. I guess I would call that unburdened self my spirit. When I touch that place and speak from there, I feel on solid ground. These essays have been essential in recovering my connection to the purer part of myself. Thank you to every single person who reads these and responds. Your generosity astounds me. You tell me every time you text or call or comment or write—keep going. And the more I go, the more I touch the deeper self that I am.

Naturally, my pernicious ego is displeased. And so it plays this mean trick: it tells me that I’m self-aggrandizing anytime I want to share my work because self promotion is tasteless and ungracious and has the smell of desperation. This fear stops me from wanting to do my work at all, in the name of humility. I have never once had someone respond to these essays by calling me a gratuitous attention-getter. There’s only one troll here, and it lives inside me.

In one of our last Artist’s Way sessions, Alice made the point that meekness can be the greatest of all ego traps—that a perception of our own righteousness and goodness becomes a way of elevating ourselves. It’s proof of how humble we are; how willing to self-sacrifice. We are a special breed, those of us who don’t want what the masses want. We are above all that. Me? Post selfies or promote my work on a regular, unabashed basis? Ha! I would never.

The spirit is alive and well in my kids who are three, six and eight years old. I watch them walk into a room and announce—without a word—Here I am! They wait for the world to receive their joy—and why would they not? They recognize their own brightness. The misguided ego hasn’t wrapped its icy fingers around their tender bodies. They are still free. I remember the feeling.

Tuesday morning, I picked up my copy of A New Earth, which I haven’t read for two years, and I landed right on this paragraph: “In form, you are and will always be inferior to some, superior to others. In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone… In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.” (Tolle, E., A New Earth; New York, Penguin, 2006; 109.)

That everyone has a spirit of equal worth is what the sophisticated ego most fears. We are not unusually brilliant, either in our glorious output or in our superior humility. Our greatest gift is our vulnerability, which lives under all of our defenses. We have to uncover and connect from that place because it is the only part of ourselves that can be truly received. Everything else is garnish—our clothes, our jobs, our favorite books: they point to something about us, but they are not who we are. We get confused about that sometimes.

How do we stay in touch with the tenderest part of ourselves while also bursting through the doorway, saying, Here I am!…? How do we show up, ready and open to be received by the world, especially a world that is as cruel as this one? My ego became so sharp and smart because it remembers the way I used to laugh at people who tried too hard or were too earnest. It knows people will laugh like that at me. It wants to keep me safe. But with a bit of distance, I recognize that my defenses have become my burdens. Still, I ask: how dare I consider the complexity of my ego knowing that a soon-to-be mother and her unborn baby were murdered in the bombing of a maternity hospital in Ukraine a few days ago? There’s that wily devil again, telling me it’s stupid and selfish to share my hope for a deeper kind of human connectedness.

This leads me to wonder: what if that troll is also a tender thing? What if it is just as wounded as the aspects of me and the broken world that it hopes to guard against? I have to nurse the ego back to helpfulness and innocence: I have to bring it into the warm kitchen and feed it soup and give it another job. I don’t expect, in this lifetime, to become the Buddha or Eckhart Tolle. I’m going to have to live with this thing. And while I don’t know how to redirect it yet, I do know that if I try to leave it behind, it’ll creep back in through the attic window like an eerie, shape-shifting shadow and scare me again.

I’ve started by re-imagining the creature: what if instead of a horned, Satanic troll, my ego is really one of these cute dolls with upright hair? I bought one. I put it on my desk. I try to imagine it as a friend who can assist me in my self-actualization, instead of a trickster who keeps me in self-defeat.

Here I am, I hold it and say. I assure it that coming back to life hurts. And that’s okay.