Auto-Aggression of the Ego Ideal

When Failure to Become Yourself Results in Depression and Collapse

The ego ideal is the inner image of the self you long to become. It sets your standards, fuels your ambitions, and defines what feels worthy or good, a constant aspirational guide and motivator.

I had a plan: to be the best. To take all the admirable traits I’d experienced in others and shape them into the ideal character.

Any grievances I suffered at others’ misgivings were to be wiped from my own interactions as attributes for failure.

Raised in the grip of perfectionism, it felt like the only natural way to be.

My undiagnosed autistic mind was dissecting others’ psychology in order to create a polished self that would fit my idealistic values.

Expectations were high. Family, friends, culture, all had to be met according to my own interpretation of them.

But my ego became a tyrant, the impossible standards, the inner critic chastising my ineptitude and failure to meet the unattainable demands.

Like an aggressive, impatient trainer, I began to punish myself for not reaching impossible standards. The chronic feelings of failure turned auto-aggression into my norm.

My inner voice barked like a drill sergeant. I’d push harder, fail, and repeat until I crumpled defeated.

The ideal, by its very nature, is always out of reach, so even achievements start to feel like they’ll never be enough.

It creates a distortion of self. Instead of becoming, you chase an unattainable phantom.

The resulting disillusionment, in my case, transitioned into all-out collapse. I had been so focused on others’ ideals I lost my sense of self, not just alienating my identity, but completely misinterpreting it.

I became anhedonic, stripped of joy or hopeful anticipation. Everything had become a problem without solution. As depression increasingly dulled my shine at work, the slightest criticism or injustice came as an all out affront. Depression felt like failure, but it was the collapse of a destructive system that couldn’t be sustained. I had been fighting the wrong battle.

Walking out of work one day never to return, my breakdown would become a reset. I could no longer be angry with everyone and everything. The anger with myself became helplessness. Like a system overloaded, my mind crashed and pulled its own plug.

Hitting bottom with a brain crunching thud, I was broken. Overwhelmed with grief, numbed by pain, lost in the labyrinth of a mind turned to mush.

Losing my job and my sense of self with it, my nervous system was dismantling itself in order to rebuild, to discover that who I was trying to be was not who I was meant to be.

I was never a good listener, my internal world too noisy, and somehow I had stopped listening to that too. Fuelled by the idea that I needed to be perfect, burned out by the reality I never would be.

It took several months just to get out from under the oppressiveness of it all and actually function without crying, another several to liberate myself from the psychological prison I had sentenced myself to for not matching up to my mind’s eye.

Eighteen months on, a lighter, more pragmatic self has taken charge. One that designs a life on my own terms, not as a collage of others’ expectations. Imperfect by nature, and by design: trying things on, seeing what fits, grounded in the messy work of creation, not the polished illusion of exhibition.