The ego gets a bad reputation. We conflate it with narcissism. Freud’s original term was in German, Das Ich — The I — and didn’t mean vanity but merely the part of the consciousness that mediates between the uninhibited id, which seeks to fulfill biological drives, and the social demands of the superego, which negotiates with the outside world. Freud’s ego is frequently subject to going awry, but it does a lot of useful things to assess external realities.
Defined in this way, the ego is not intrinsically bad. It’s an adaptable tool to sculpt a self out of and navigate that self through the sensible world. The ego does not make you a bad person, it makes you feel like a person, period. The ego does not hamper your dreams — without the Freudian ego, our dreams would be to eat, shit, fuck and run from danger.
Everyone talks about finding our true selves, but the self matures, the self changes, the self adjusts itself. Is my true self my original, vague idea of self? Is it the self who does or does not do specified activities? Is my true self the person I was at 30, the person I will be at 50 or the person I am today? When I find my true self, am I going to stop changing and become a static character who always exhibits a predetermined set of virtues and faults? How will I know when I’ve found her? Do I get a glimpse of the true self, so I can measure my presumably fake self against her and see how close I am? Who made my true self?
The self is a lifelong construction, not a riddle. No one action, no bit of media I consume, no piece of clothing runs the risk of defining me permanently. I can embrace or reject, destroy and rebuild. I am not obligated to dislike or pledge loyalty to the person I am at this moment.
I am not condemned to be a person I dislike.