When You Live Your Whole Life Through Your Ego, You Eventually Go Crazy.
Finally, you lose connection to your soul.
This is my theory: addiction to ego satisfaction leads to mental illness. I have no proof for this: I only know what I have seen.
My theory first came to me when I was having an argument with a friend. We had been friends for about five years. I was drawn to her loud charm and outrageous sense of humor. We worked together and supported each other through the aftermath of her divorce, our struggles in mid-life dating, and, finally, the death of my husband.
I will call my friend Margaux. I will speak of her in the past tense, even though she is still alive.
She is dead to me.
Margaux had a big personality. She was tall and large. She was pushy, arrogant, and utterly full of herself. For some reason, I read this as strength. She was actually a very weak, childish person. She was obsessed with status — mostly her own lost status. She had been brought up in an upper middle-class family and she had been married to a successful, rich doctor with whom she had a child. When I became friends with her, she was a divorced single mother with a young daughter. She bitterly resented having to share custody of her five-year-old child with her ex-husband.
