the artist way ✿ what remains when identity ends?

12 week journey ✿ chapter 8: recovering a sense of strength (except make it take 3 weeks and cost me ego death)

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00 :: the field note

oh man, chapter 8 spanned two, almost three weeks? on accident, i swear. the thing is, i was being asked to feel strong in my decisions (as per chapter title: recovering a sense of strength) and so i absolutely couldn’t move forward until… well… i felt strong. thus creates an open loop.

…meanwhile i been going through identity crisis all these weeks. more on my ego death below 👇

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01 :: the identity death

i had a weird sense of identity annihilation this past week. i guess i been building to it, in a way. i’ve been calling it ego death, because that’s what it felt like… the death of an old, tired self-concept.

one that carried me throughout my entire life… which is why it hurts so bad to feel misalignment within an identity that held me for so long. i have grieved this death.

i spoke about this ego death sensation with a few others and i was met with gentle encouragement, that it was not an identity death but that of “finding oneself.”

i smiled at them, and nodded. my inner world looked like collapse to me, what do they know about that? i know what nurturing self-concept and finding your identity feels like… i’ve done that, been on that journey. this felt… different.

how could my identity as i knew it continue to exist, after all? i’ve woken up to so many things these past few weeks. woke up with a sledgehammer and took to bludgeoning the pillars of my psyche, is what i did. just woke up on a random tuesday questioning my identity so deeply i shattered what was keeping it aloft:

“what if i am borderline personality disorder?” and honestly? almost more frightening to me… what if i’m not? and that was that. the question engraved on the tombstone of my old self.

she was an obsessive people pleaser. until she realized she used it as a form of self abandonment.

she constantly looked for external validation, permission, and advice. until she realized she could just trust… herself.

at that? they cracked: the pillars of support within her psyche keeping her identity withstanding.

i imagine them falling as a great bridge; the cylinders of support concrete breaking and being swallowed by the hungry ocean, the waves hungry for their years of effort.

and as the concrete cracked, fell, became swallowed, and her sense of identity fell in with it? the familiar liminal void ensued. normally filled with identity panic and time urgency, blotting any light, just waves crashing and careening concrete and darkness and lack of breath and water in the lungs until she very quickly picked the next identity very fast right away how about this one — wait.

she can breathe. she is dry, standing on the shoreline to a green slab of land she never knew existed because she was too busy living the same previous identity for her entire young adult life.

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02 :: the lesson

of course, there is the fear of the unknown. the hesitation, a small, fleeting desire to throw herself back in the water because at least drowning is a familiar way of living versus braving the unknown of an entirely new identity.

sometimes, what once held us begins to drown us. and still, leaving it can feel more frightening than staying.

but perhaps the identity waiting is not entirely new… perhaps it is only a new perspective on the Self that was already there, born from personal sacrifice.

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03 :: blurts & affirmations

my core blurt: i cannot move forward until i am sure/strong in my identity.

the affirmation that got me moving again: i do not have to have myself or my identity all figured out before moving forward.

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04 :: chapter tasks

the chapter tasks are actually what helped clarify some things for me post-death. i realized i am in a deep deprivation of permission, a famine inflicted upon myself… by myself. more and more i’m realizing that The Artist’s Way chapters are supposed to disrupt your regularly scheduled programming.

my lack of resiliency to identity change baffled me until i realized the chapters are engineered to constantly demand asking of ourselves who we are, what we want to do… ugh, all the exhausting stuff that normal people like me at 32 years old probably don’t freaking have figured out just yet, fam ?! like maybe i thought i did for a decade or so and now I don’t think i do.

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05 :: taking it with me

for me my ego death was not the full disappearance of Self, but the collapse of the unstable thought structures through which I used to identify and understand myself. there is a strange space between no longer being who you were and not yet knowing who you are fully becoming. even though i do not know what i will discover on this island of curiosity, for the first time in a long time I feel strong and confident in my steps forward.

⋆。°✩ audio file ✩°。⋆

audio field note

real, honest, raw audio-based morning page audio snippet:

⋆。°✩ outro ✩°。⋆

₊˚⊹♡ just make the weird little thing exist first ♡⊹˚₊

(you can make it better later.)

xoxo, nikki. 💕