Ego Death

25 June 2026 · 6 min read

This piece has a piece of music that accompanies it. Press play on Polyphia's "Ego Death" and let it run while you read - it is the song that has been carrying me through all of this. There are no lyrics in this piece of music, just feeling.

I think I have been going through something I did not have a name for, and this week the names arrived.

The first is ego death. The dismantling of the small self - the conditioned thoughts, the attachments, the fictional stories I have told about who I am. The career I once feared not having. The image. The version of me I have spent a lifetime keeping presentable. A wiping clean of the slate, of all the meaning I was handed and never actually chose.

The second, my friend the Hare told me about. "The dark night of the soul". The long, often agonising stretch where the old self is collapsing but the new one has not yet arrived, and you feel disconnected, lost, unsure who you even are. St John of the Cross wrote about it four hundred years ago. I have apparently been living inside it for weeks without knowing it had a name.

And the strange relief of naming it is this: I am not falling apart. I am letting go.

Because the truth, underneath all of it, is that I am tired. I have been so tired for so long of carrying who I am. The way I am wired - the noticing of everything, the looping, the conversations I finish in my own head long after they have ended, the constant low hum of bracing for what might go wrong. And the mask. The endless, exhausting work of arranging myself into something acceptable. Editing each sentence before it leaves my mouth. Performing a smoother, easier version of myself so that other people would not have to feel the weight of the real one. I have worn it so long I forgot it was a mask. I thought it was me.

It was not me. It was the scaffolding. The old ego.

And this is the part I am only now beginning to understand: the ego builds itself out of fear and control. The Judge is part of that scaffolding. That precise, immediate voice that arrives with the verdict already formed, that says too much, not enough, not acceptable. For most of my life I believed the Judge was telling me the truth about myself. I see now it was only ever guarding the structure - keeping me small enough, careful enough, masked enough to feel safe. It was never my conscience. It was the fear, wearing my own voice.

And when a structure built on fear finally collapses, it feels, for a while, like losing everything. That is the terror of it. You reach for who you were and your hand closes on nothing. But I am beginning to suspect the nothing is not loss. It is space. It is the slate wiped clean. It is what is left when you finally stop holding up a self that was exhausting you to hold.

They say resistance is what turns it to agony. That if you grip the old identity as it goes, you suffer - and that if you can recognise it as the death of an illusion rather than the death of you, you can soften, and surrender, and let it pass through you instead of tearing you on the way out.

And here is the thing I keep arriving at. I think the writing has been the surrender.

Every entry, every chapter, every late and desperate paragraph - that was me setting another piece of the old self down on the page where I could finally look at it. Getting it out of the vortex, where it only ever circled and gathered speed, and onto something that holds still. You cannot release what you cannot see. The page is where I have been able to see it, one piece at a time. And once I could see it, I could let it go.

And if I trace it back, it started small. It started with me putting the mask down with a friend. One true thing, let to be seen instead of arranged. That is where it really began to come undone. You pull a single honest thread, and the whole careful structure starts to unravel.

There is a map for this, it turns out. David Hawkins called it the Map of Consciousness - a ladder of states, from shame and guilt and grief at the very bottom, up through fear and anger and pride, across the great threshold of courage, and on into acceptance, love, joy, peace. Looking back over these weeks, I think I have been bouncing all over it. Lurching from the bottom rungs to near the top and back down again, sometimes inside a single day, or a single hour.

The Map of Consciousness, developed by David R. Hawkins

I have stopped reading that as instability. I think it was processing. Every state I landed in was something I had been carrying for years and never once let myself feel all the way through. I was not coming apart. I was finally feeling the whole backlog - emotion by emotion, rung by rung - and setting each one down as I passed it.

So perhaps that is what all of this has been. Not a breakdown. An undoing. A long, slow, frightening, necessary putting-down of a self I was never meant to carry this far.

I do not think I am through it. I do not think you arrive anywhere clean and finished. The Judge will come back. At least his voice will perhaps be a little quieter now. The tiredness will return. Some morning soon I will pick the old self up again out of pure habit, before I remember I had set it down. But this morning, for the first time in a long while, my hands are empty - and they do not ache. And I am not frightened of the emptiness. I am laughing in it.

I have been carrying myself like a boulder. And I am learning, at last, to set myself down. I have a gift, that I can write the true thing and I have the courage to share it. And in that courage the world becomes a happier place.

And when I set the heavy thing down and look up, I see how much I have. My family. My friends. A whole life I have spent so long bracing inside that I forgot, too often, to feel grateful for it. My wife, who carries more than I ever have and still makes beautiful things. My children, who called up a strength in her that none of us knew was there. The friends who really know me - who can keep me steady without even trying or realising what they are doing. I have been so busy carrying myself that I missed how held I already am. I am not doing any of this alone. I never was. And this morning, more than anything, that is what I am grateful for. I have never felt more free than in this moment.

Further reading, if any of this met something in you, or if you're not quite sure what I wrote here:

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