Ego Tripping Until Sun Down

I deliberated about what I would write about tonight. It was either going to be a song that I heard a few months ago that I kept telling myself I would take the time to write about, or it was going to be about something that happened to me today that not only made me laugh hysterically, but also made me quite confused.

But perhaps there is an element of both things that are connected. The song in question is I'm the Problem by Morgan Wallen. Now, I would never voluntarily listen to this song. From what little I know of him, he seems like your run of the mill ego driven musician that makes lackluster music for the masses; however, I was at a client site and did not have control over what was being played.

The first thing that I noticed about this overly popular song is just how abusive the language is. The victim blaming. The gaslighting. The lack of self awareness.

The thing that happened to me today is that, as I was sitting at a stop light, someone began yelling at me as though I was doing something wrong. I was stopped at a stop light just as I should have been, minding my own business. The thing I failed to notice, and I would have done the polite thing had I actually been paying attention but it was first thing in the morning and my insomnia is worse than it has ever been, is that I had stopped right in front of a parking lot entrance. Now, this woman waiting to get into the parking lot of this cigarette shop was clearly having a really bad morning. I had noticed she was yelling, but I couldn't fathom why she would have been yelling at me; however, once I realized she was I rolled down my window to see what all the fuss was about. She proceeded to cuss me out for "illegally" stopping in front of the parking lot entrance. That isn't illegal. It isn't an intersection, and if that would have been all it was then I would have politely apologized and done something in order to let her through, regardless of how angry she was, but what she said next had me lose it. Not in a bad way, no, I burst out laughing uncontrollably. She told me I got my license in 1947. She said it to get under my skin and thought it would hurt, but I couldn't stop laughing. Like, to the point I had to roll up my window because it was so funny to me.

Both of these events are very ego-centric points of view. Morgan Wallen, proceeds to call himself the problem, which should give way to introspection and possible emotional growth. Instead, what happens is that he then flips the script utilizing the exact same kinds of language that abusers have always used - like, why didn't you leave if I am such a problem? Or, why fall in love with him if he is the worst thing in the world?

The woman in the vehicle clearly thought so highly of herself that she believed she had the right to be in that parking lot buying her cigarettes more than I had the right to be stopped on the road at a stop light.

Now, as a side note, I do wish i would have been a lot quicker thinking on my feet and thought to apologize, and then tell her that I would make it up to her by taking her to dinner or something equally as absurd to break all the tension of the moment. Instead, I am sure she just ended up getting even more angry knowing that I was laughing at what she had said. Clearly someone who alludes to me being my grandpa's age would have said no to the date, but had she then maybe it would have been an interesting experience for all involved.

Back to the point, though. I think the underlying problem with both of these people is that they have felt their own egos attacked. Perhaps the woman in the car just really needed that fucking cigarette right then, but the mild inconvenience of waiting for a light to turn green and for a few cars to pass should not render the kind of reaction of cussing someone out across traffic. To believe that you're so important that you have the right to degrade another human being because you're not getting your way right in that specific moment is a really interesting concept to me, but I also know that I have been that person in the past. And the entire reason I was that was is due to having an over inflated ego.

The concept of either of these two scenarios - the song or the woman - really works to highlight how awful humanity can be just so they can protect their ego. I have no doubt the woman in the car, had I snapped back with some anger directed towards her, could have easily come out of that car with the intent to attack me. She was already berated me with such absurd anger that it caused me to break my stoic nature and delve into laughing so hard I could barely breathe. And Morgan Wallen clearly having been so hurt by the words that he had hurt someone that he wrote an entire song excusing away his behavior, and then retorting it to essentially calling the other person a liar for choosing to stay.

For anyone who has never been in an abusive relationship, the cycles that the abuser puts the victim through can be such an emotional rollercoaster that a person may not even be able to see anything else, as though they spend so much of their mental energy just trying to figure out how they feel that they never gain enough footing to be able to think of getting out. Or the abuser will take control of aspects of the victims life to the point that they don't feel that there is actually any way out of the situation.

In either case, however, I would be hard pressed to believe that there is much hope of either of those people to see beyond themselves far enough to actually see the weight of how their actions can impact others. If an ego gets too big, that person must spend massive amounts of mental energy to maintain that sense of ego - whether it be through making up correlations to the reality they live in to bridge the gap of where their ego is compared to where the experience itself is, or whether it be to outright disregard another person as having an entire existence entirely in order to believe they are somehow more important.

Humans are such an interesting species. We have all this ability to rationalize our existence, but we use that mental energy to instead justify our egos. And we are all guilty of it to an extent. I can justify spending going to the same restaurant nearly every Friday night to reward myself for making it through another week just to feed my ego every bit as much as someone who isn't emotionally cognizant of themselves can justify screaming at a person in traffic and accusing him of being in his 90's, just as much as someone else can physically abuse someone and then utter the words, "I wouldn't have done that if you hadn't..." insert excuse for their ego being so hurt that they would physically harm someone else.

I still wish I could have seen that woman's reaction had I been sharper with my response this morning.

-Dustin S. Stover