We spend years constructing versions of ourselves that can survive other people’s eyes. We add confidence where there is doubt, certainty where there is fear, and scale where there is emptiness. Slowly, that constructed self begins to occupy more space than the person who created it. The strange thing about ego is that it does not always grow from strength. Sometimes it grows from protection. From the need to be admired, understood, respected, envied, or simply noticed. And the more carefully we keep that image alive, the harder it becomes to remember where it ends and we begin. Perhaps the quiet danger of ego is not that it makes us appear larger than we are, but that while keeping it alive, we fail to notice what is slowly becoming smaller within us. Digital drawing created in Procreate.