It’s Crawling Through Hell With Your Skin Torn Off While the World Keeps Walking AROUND YOU
Nobody tells you this part.
They sell ego death like a breakthrough.
A revelation.
A glow-up.
They don’t tell you it starts with your body moving before your mind can catch up.
With dancing alone to a track literally called “Ego Death”, bass rattling your bones, sweat pouring, lungs burning, screaming lyrics into empty space like a confession you didn’t know you were making yet.
They don’t tell you it feels like psychological waterboarding stretched across months.
They don’t tell you it feels like being tortured internally and externally at the same time.
They don’t tell you that one terrible decision, and one moment five days later where you refuse to lie to yourself anymore, can avalanche into not knowing who the fuck you are anymore.
I didn’t dance because I felt free.
I danced because something inside me was dying and needed a body to pass through.
I did not gently lose myself months ago.
I destroyed a relationship and a few days later, destroyed an identity that was killing me and people I loved.
And it detonated my entire nervous system.
As the song says, “Sometimes you gotta kill yourself to find out if you do exist”
Not literally killing myself, or saying I want to die.
But killing the identity of patterns that were killing me and everything in my life, so I could find out who I was underneath it all, and finally end the paths of destruction permanently, completely, and forever.
Identity Death Does Not Come With Witnesses
There is no audience for this.
No applause.
No validation.
Only one rare moment, in months, where someone taps you on the shoulder and says, “I see how hard this is.”
And literally nothing else, at any point.
Just you.
Alone.
Bleeding internally.
While the world keeps functioning like nothing happened.
I wake up every day with my body already activated.
Heart racing. Jaw tight. Muscles clenched. Skin buzzing.
A nervous system screaming DANGER even when my mind knows I am safe.
I can be mentally calm and still feel like I am being hunted.
That disconnect is its own kind of hell.
Screaming Into the Ocean
I have screamed into the ocean like a wild animal.
Late at night on the Little Squalicum Pier.
Cold.
Wind howling.
Rain hitting sideways like needles.
I have stood at the edge of the world, soaked to the bone and shivering, screaming FUCK YOU into the dark until my throat burned raw and my voice cracked.
Until my eyes burned like fire from the tears of rage, sadness, confusion, and frustration that poured out like a flash-flood.
Because something in me was dying without my consent.
I have wailed because I do not understand what is happening to me.
Because I did something I regret, have tried to make understanding with it, and yet everything still hurts, sometimes even more than it did at the beginning.
Because I ended patterns that were destroying me and somehow the pain got louder instead of quieter.
Ego death is not poetic.
It’s fucking feral.
The Secondary Losses Nobody Warns You About
Ego death doesn’t just take the mask.
It takes people.
Some I abandoned.
Some drifted away quietly.
Some ghosted me without explanation.
Some stopped checking in.
Some decided I was “too much,” “too intense,” or “too inconvenient” once I stopped performing stability for their comfort.
And some tried to make me rationalize and justify the most painful decisions of my life so they wouldn’t have to sit with the discomfort of them.
That part hurt almost as much as the breakup itself.
Because when you stop avoiding, stop people-pleasing, stop numbing, stop pretending everything is fine, you stop being useful to certain people.
You stop being:
- the emotional dumping ground
- the reliable fixer
- the endlessly patient one
- the one who absorbs chaos without complaint
- the one who stays quiet so others don’t have to change
And when that role disappears, so do they.
Some people left because my pain was inconvenient.
Some left because my boundaries disrupted the old dynamic.
Some left because my accountability made them uncomfortable.
Some left because they wanted a version of me that no longer exists.
Others stayed silent because they didn’t know what to say and chose nothing instead.
No text.
No check-in.
No “how are you really doing?”
Silence can be abandonment too.
Family members stopped reaching out.
Friends faded into the background.
People I thought would walk with me through the fire quietly turned around when the heat got real.
And the cruelest part is this:
Many of them framed it as concern.
As advice.
As “you did the best you could.”
As “it wasn’t that bad.”
As “you shouldn’t feel so guilty.”
As “there was no other way you could have done that”
As “it was going to happen no matter what”
As “these things are messy, have grace with yourself”
But what they were really saying was:
Please stop making me feel uncomfortable by taking this so seriously.
I didn’t need absolution.
I didn’t need minimizing.
I needed witnessing.
Instead, I got distance.
This is the hidden cost of integrity.
When you stop lying to yourself, you expose where others have been lying too.
And not everyone survives that exposure.
So I grieve them all.
The ones I left.
And the ones who left me when I stopped being easy.
I carry that loss alone and quietly, like everything else.
Daily Triggers and Constant Activation
Every day feels like a minefield.
Gestures. Looks. Unwanted touches. Places. Sounds.
Being unexpectedly tapped on the shoulder from behind and given a sinister smile by an old friend walking by, and being flipped the bird 🖕 by another person moments later ripped everything wide open, again.
Anger detonates.
Grief floods in.
My body reacts before my mind can catch up.
I can be walking down the street jamming to my favorite tunes and suddenly my chest tightens, my vision narrows, and I am scanning everything like I am in a war zone.
Hypervigilance is exhausting.
Always checking.
Always bracing.
Always waiting for the next mortar to hit me.
I am tired of being on guard, but my body refuses to stand down.
Boundaries Get Tested Before They Protect You
Nobody tells you that when you finally start setting boundaries, they get tested harder than ever.
Violated.
Pushed.
Dismissed.
Minimized.
Denied entirely.
Sometimes subtly.
Sometimes aggressively.
Every violation feels like another blade dragged across already exposed nerves.
I am learning how to say no without collapsing.
How to hold the line without apologizing.
How to stay present instead of disappearing.
That shit hurts.
Nervous System Dysregulation Is Its Own Torture Chamber
There are moments when my mind is clear and my body is completely hijacked.
Shaking.
Tingling.
Heat.
Restlessness.
Dread.
Heart pounding for hours.
I can sit perfectly still and feel like I am about to crawl out of my skin.
Some days it gets so intense that I dissociate.
I feel far away from myself.
Detached.
Like I am watching my life from behind thick glass.
That scares the absolute shit out of me.
But I stay.
I do not run.
I do not numb.
I do not escape.
I breathe and wait for my body to come back online.
The Patterns I Am Ending
This is the part nobody sees.
This is the part nobody claps for.
I am eliminating my avoidance.
I am eliminating my poor communication.
I am eliminating my performative personas.
I am eliminating my lack of boundaries.
I am eliminating my anxious attachment.
I am eliminating my insecurities.
I am eliminating my fear of abandonment.
I am eliminating my fear of rejection.
I am eliminating my fear of loss of love.
I am eliminating my other relationship fears.
I am eliminating my trauma responses.
I am eliminating rebound relationships.
I am eliminating my self-hatred.
I am eliminating my deep internal shame.
I am eliminating my mental poisons.
I am eliminating my poor mental health management.
I am eliminating substance and alcohol use.
I am eliminating blame shifting, denial, and dodging accountability.
I am eliminating any version of myself that acts without integrity or honesty.
I am eliminating breaking my own fucking heart ever again with these patterns.
None of this is theoretical.
Every single one of these eliminations hurts like hell.
They were coping mechanisms.
They were survival strategies.
They were how I stayed functional.
Letting them die feels like freefall.
Doing This Sober and Unarmored
No alcohol.
No weed.
No drugs.
No numbing.
Every feeling hits at full volume.
Grief that feels endless.
Guilt that sits in my chest like concrete.
Anger that flares without warning.
Sadness and hurt that smothers and drowns me.
I am feeling consequences I earned and deserve and not running from them.
That takes more courage than pretending everything is fine.
It takes every last thing I have left to give.
Watching the World Lie to Itself
I watch people everywhere and everyday claiming they are “doing the work” and enthusiastically moving forward with the individual challenges they are experiencing in their lives.
- Chatting with everyone about all of their inner healing while continuing to numb theirselves with drugs and alcohol.
- Talking at large about huge personal gains while blame-shifting and dodging all accountability for the burning bridges they torched off.
- Claiming their lives are “unprecedently good” while leaving wounded people everywhere behind them.
- Sharing all the bliss and adorement of themselves and the world, while continuing to hurt and be cruel to other people behind their backs or when nobody is looking.
- Having volumes of important realizations in their lives while still repeating their old harmful and toxic patterns.
- Cheering everyone on to be their very best selves while never making amends with people they hurt and never owning an ounce of their shit.
Meanwhile…
They continue to hurt people.
They continue to hurt themselves.
They continue to skip the reckoning.
They continue to avoid their storms and shadows.
They continue to run from their problems, hoping they never catch up.
Then, to top it all off they carefully curate their false-narratives into something deeply inspirational and spread it all over the place. It’s a classic example of illusionary performance. Like a fucking magician wooing a crowd.
I do not get or want that fucking so-called luxury.
Because I chose to stop running from my shit.
I want to be real, as I am.
Even if it makes me the most unpopular person on the planet.
Avoidance Almost Killed Me
For most of my life, I survived by being patient, understanding, accommodating, and quiet.
I waited.
I endured.
I swallowed resentment and called it love.
That version of me looked good on the outside. People loved it.
Inside, I was dying. I let the avoidance monster destroy me and everything in my life, one last and final time.
Instead of reviving him again, like I always did, I killed him with my own hands.
No ceremony.
No permission.
No safety net.
Just a sober man standing in the wreckage saying,
“This ends now. Forever. I don’t care what it takes, I am never going back.”
The Gamble
Everything I am doing is a big fucking gamble.
No guarantees.
No roadmap.
No certainty.
I do not know if this leads to peace or just a different kind of pain.
I do not know if this leads to connection or lifelong solitude.
I just know the old way was killing me.
“I ain’t perfect, that’s for damn sure.”
There are multiple versions of me in here, arguing and integrating.
“Split personality, there’s five of us.”
Some days I feel loony as fuck.
Some days I do not recognize myself at all.
“Who is this? I don’t know. A mix of my influences.”
Light and darkness tango constantly inside me.
Yin and yang.
Love and rage.
Remorse and resolve.
I am not trying to be pure.
I am trying to be whole.
“New perspective what I came for.”
“Good or evil life’s a game we learn to gamble.”
This is my gamble.
Accountability Without Absolution
I have made amends with people I have harmed knowing they may never be acknowledged or cared about.
I have owned the hurt I have caused knowing it may never be forgiven or believed.
I have faced consequences knowing there may be no repair.
Not to be redeemed.
But to be accountable and stop my cycles. For good.
To give my guilt somewhere to land so it does not keep poisoning me.
My only recognition comes from this.
I know, without question, that I am not repeating my patterns. My concience is clean about that.
That knowledge is mine.
Even when everything else feels like hell.
Ego Death Is Endurance
It is months of crying alone.
Confusion.
Hypervigilance.
Fear.
Dissociation.
Crawling forward raw and bleeding.
It is screaming into the ocean and then going home, warming up, and doing it again tomorrow.
It is living without applause. Or even being noticed at all.
It is choosing integrity while being flayed alive.
What Comes After Ego Death
Nobody talks about this part either.
After enough days of staying.
After enough nights of not running.
After enough moments where your body screams and you do not abandon yourself.
Something shifts.
Not all at once.
Not dramatically.
Not in a way you can post about.
Your nervous system begins to hesitate before panicking.
It still flares.
It still misfires.
But it starts checking in with you.
Are we actually in danger?
Or are we remembering one?
You begin to feel micro-moments of safety.
Seconds where your shoulders drop.
Minutes where your breath deepens.
Glimpses where you realize you are still here.
Still intact.
Still breathing.
Still capable of joy.
Trust does not return as confidence.
It returns as tolerance.
The ability to feel without collapsing.
The ability to grieve without disappearing.
The ability to be seen without performing.
This is not peace yet.
But it is stability forming under the wreckage.
I let myself die.
I did not save the old version of me.
I let him die.
And something unfinished, wounded, ferocious, and honest is learning how to live in his place.
I am crawling through hell bleeding and raw.
I am doing it sober.
I am doing it without witnesses.
I am doing it anyway.
Even if no one ever fucking sees it.
And that is the point.
I’m not doing it to be seen, acknowledged, loved, or anything else. I am doing it only for me.
Because I love myself, exactly as who I am in this moment today.
I hope you love yourself the same way too. ❤️