TLDNR
I’m a douchebag. I’ve got an ego problem.
I’m not proud of it. That’s an issue with having an ego problem: it justifies itself pretty easily if you let it. You get people proud of it. They shouldn’t be. You can very easily sound like one of those girls who says “sorry for partying”. It’s an ego problem because it’s a problem: I irk people and it’s not healthy. I’m loud and bombastic. I might be your nightmare on public transportation. I am friends with bros, true bros who play rugby and drink beer shirtless in the afternoon. I say “swag” earnestly. And that rubs some people the wrong way.
You should know that the flip-side of a big ego is terrible insecurity: since perhaps twelve or thirteen I’ve had pretty serious anxiety about my place as a comedy writer and as a talent. I’m mentally comparing myself to individuals who are not only exceedingly talented but exceedingly lucky. It’s one thing to tell myself I have to write as well as Simon Rich, but it’s less healthy to tell myself, as I often have, that I have to beat him.
I’m immature, trying to balance an unfair sense of entitlement with the gnawing fear that I’ll end up somehow average, one Word Document among thousands, indistinguishable. And there’s nothing wrong with average or normal. But there are two people who insist on being special: narcissists and the insecure. And I’m both, and I think most of the first are also the second.
I mean, think offhand of the most detestable people you can think of, say, reality stars and fame whores. Now try to think from a different mindset. God, that’s so, so, so sad. And I say that with no patronization, I say that a self-aware denizen of a sadly similar mindset that when you require the attention of thousands it has a lot more to do with the desperate need for approval than it does with “ego” per se. It’s mislabled.
The last thing to stress is that I *like* most of the people who end up not liking me. Most of the disliked people I know-say, from the “douchebag” category I’m sometimes placed in-are very affable people. Give them/us the benefit of the doubt. Because maybe hating on someone you don’t know makes you more of a douche than they.
