Perhaps this is the tenth time I’m writing about the last six months of 2015 and the six months after my military service, when I felt genuinely happy. Inner happiness. If I try to visualize it, there was a cylinder in my chest, unlike most other times in my life (including now), that wasn’t empty. In that cylinder, I didn’t feel pain, frustration, weakness, or sadness. Perhaps the best word is that I didn’t feel emptiness. I didn’t feel a void. That’s the closest I can describe that feeling. I hope this makes sense.

During those six months, I knew what had changed in my life, but I didn’t know which of these changes freed me from years of inner torment. Torment? Huff. That sense of emptiness. I didn’t trace it until spring 2018, when I wrote it all in my journal, connecting them to a central circle and placing a question mark inside: What’s missing in the midst of these six months?

Time passed until December 2018, when a disaster struck my life, and I drew dozens of circles around that central one, as far as my ink pen would allow. Also, a bottle got emptied during it. What is the missing thing that everyone has and I don’t?

Last night (when I wrote this, February 2019), during a discussion with my roommate, a distant island began to appear for finding that missing piece.

After nearly three months of living freely in my house without paying a dime, my roommate responded firmly to my request to return home earlier and not be outside at those hours in that unfamiliar city: “It’s none of your business.” Shocked by such a reply under such circumstances and choices, I raised my clenched fists above my head and said, I found it.

The idea emerged that others (almost everyone I know) have something inside them that they never sacrifice for the external environment. Under no obligation, interest, or condition do they give it away; instead, they strengthen it at all costs. Friends, acquaintances, relatives, neighbors, passersby, bank clerks, everyone outside is merely a tool to make that inner thing stronger and more powerful.

This “inner thing” doesn’t demand much. Its whole purpose is for you to always feel good, in your choices, in the mornings when you wake up, at night when you sleep. It wants you to have good relationships, fun, happiness, and sufficient inner satisfaction, at all costs.

Apparently, Freud calls it the ego. One part of the triad: id, ego, and superego in human personality. A layer of personality that overlays the id (the inner infant) and fulfills the id’s desires logically.

Where was the void? Here: my ego had learned how to obtain what the id wants, but it hadn’t learned one thing, how to express what the id wants to release. As a result, the id takes over, scattering itself like an oblivious infant. Nothing remains, creating a void. It gives so much that nothing is left for itself. Imagine enduring something; when you endure, you consume part of your ego. If you overdo it or don’t refill it, you become someone like me. At night, when sleeping, or in the mornings, it’s like a vacuum or a black hole that draws your entire being inward.

In software, we call it IO, input and output. I had built the input system through trial and error, but the output was lacking. In fact, there was no proper output; data simply spilled out without control. Not knowing this, I became frustrated when my environment didn’t function the same way. Why don’t they fully connect with the outside world like me? How much life do we have to wrap our inner feelings like this? Ugh.

Once I understood, I could see thousands of examples of others protecting their ego, from someone avoiding an unwanted task for four hours, to thousands dying to preserve one person’s ego, to granting immense freedoms to themselves to compensate for ego blows.

If this seems obvious, don’t be surprised. It really is. Everyone knows this internally. I just didn’t. And here’s why: my father worked in the capital until I was eight, and I saw him only 10–15 days per year. My mother was solely responsible for raising me. My social interactions before school were limited to home and the front yard. No one instilled this in me. Not only was there no one to build it, but no one tried to prevent the destruction of those initial cells.

Freud, may he rest in peace, says the ego forms by age five. Yes. The issue was resolved. Consequently, all apparently unrelated social relationship problems were solved. As my roommate put it, as long as your glass is empty or half-full, you can’t fill someone else’s glass. You can give to others only when your own glass is not only full but overflowing.