Reflection: The Ego Death of 2025

A photo I took of a woman last December walking with her cup of tea in the snow, remarking that I wanted to be just like her by this time next year.

This year untangled and unraveled me. The deeply embedded, subconscious patterns that cycled through my brain finally began to melt, like wax walls collapsing in on themselves. I think the greatest ego death for me came from my layoff in August. Before that, I felt like I was functioning at surface level, just trying to keep my head above the water of my own bad habits

I always believed that being “good” would create stability, because for so much of my life, stability was something I desperately wanted and felt I had to earn. The emotional undercurrents of my psyche felt like wavelengths ebbing and flowing, without any real direction—just a lot of chaos and uncertainty. I coped through control, ultimately developing an obsession for wanting things to be predictable. 

I want to be vulnerable here and say that at the beginning of 2025, I was underweight — less than I had been in years. I developed a smorgasbord of phobias that I believed were keeping me safe, because I no longer felt like myself. I was too afraid to leave the house. I was too afraid to move my body. I was in and out of doctor appointments and emergency rooms. I was in freeze.

I felt like a shadow of who I used to be: gaunt, smaller, too scared to take up space. I had been stuck inside my head since late 2024, and the start of this year made that visible. I was coping my way through life, just trying to get through each day, because I was too delusional to see that the life I was living wasn't actually what I wanted. I remember telling my therapist that my life felt like one huge eating disorder, a performance of control over one thing or another to feel something, anything. 

When I was laid off, it felt like I had completed a karmic cycle. I know that sounds funny, but to me, it felt like life was finally saying, “You’ve been torturing yourself long enough—now go experience yourself without any of this noise.” Everything was being taken away, everything I built through this facade, this persona of goodness and following the rules and making the "right" decisions was being thrown out the literal and metaphorical window.

But I also knew, deep down, that this time was sacred. For the first time in maybe seven years, I was going to have space to explore nothing—to not strive, not push, not be good. I could see the concern in my father’s eyes when I told him I didn’t want to rush into another job. He thought I should accept anything that was given to me, just to keep myself busy—but his logic was fueled by fear and scarcity, and I didn’t want to live that way anymore. I had been operating in fear for the past 25 years, and I knew that if I didn’t choose differently now, the next 25 might feel the same.

I’ve been asking myself: what happens when I de-center this facade from my life? When I take off the mask—when I’m alone in my room, when there’s nothing but silence—what’s left of me when there’s nowhere to go and nothing to give? I’ve never seen myself so clearly. This is who I’ve always been; that goodness, that perfectionism, was a coping mechanism—a response to not feeling safe enough to exist.

I’ve always belonged to something or someone, never fully belonging to myself. In this brief slice of time, I belong to nothing—and that makes me feel so free.

Within that freedom, my body is relearning how to feel safe inside itself. I think it’s because of that safety that I can now, finally, make art. I didn’t truly begin my art practice until November; it took my nervous system some time after the layoff to figure things out. By no means do I think I’m meant to be an artist, but returning to this fundamental, almost instinctual part of myself has taught me that the marathon of the past 25 years wasn’t about going somewhere—it was about coming back.

I’ve been the same person this entire time; I just wasn’t accepting who I was. When I was part of Girls Write Now earlier this year, I remember entering the program with the goal of finding my voice. My mentor told me how she identifies as a writer—how it’s an anchor she always returns to—and I shared that my anchor has always been the word artist. I feel like my existence is art: the way I see the world is art, the way I move through the world is art.

My father wanted me to go into finance—to make truckloads of money, to buy objects that fill nothing but the space outside of me. He wanted my life to make sense to him. Society wants our lives to be digestible, easy to understand—but my life, as I choose it going forward, will not make sense. I do not want to climb anything. I do not want to jump through anything. I do not want to balance on anything.

I show up, in the fullness of myself, as I am. I show up for myself even when I’m scared, even when I’m sad, even when I’m anxious, even when I’m uncertain. I hope that this reflection inspires you to come back home to yourself, no matter how far you’ve strayed—and that, by writing this, I am releasing parts of it from myself. I’m not there yet, not even close, but it feels good to own that now and to say that I am unfinished, uncertain, and unknown.

It's snowing today, so I might go for a walk with my cup of tea.