Unsubscribe From the Self: Reckoning with Ego Death and Fostering Community Consciousness
I psyched myself out too much to look in the mirror the other morning. I read a since-deleted Tweet daring me to stare at my own reflection for 10 minutes during my early-consciousness scroll.
“You don’t exist like you think you do,” it promised.
In recent states of isolation, I’ve been (more than typically) concerned that I don’t exist at all. I kept my eyes on the tile when I went to pee and kept them closed to avoid the mirror while spitting out my toothpaste.
I’ve been thinking a lot about ego death. “Ego” is a three-letter word that refers to one’s own idea of self–who they are, what they are like, how they are seen. Death of ego, then, is a detachment from subjective self-identity.
The ego is a manifestation of subjectivity — the innate limitation of humans to understand anything, including ourselves, beyond the scope of our personal perspective. My perspective — my brain — feels to me like a house in which I am endlessly quarantined to wander alone. I have neighbors and I have seen into their houses, but I can never leave my house to see theirs from a different angle or step inside, and I can never know what the outside of my house looks like; I can only guess. But, if I were to simply kill my ego, I could see my house and my neighbor’s house and our whole cul de sac and town and world from a multidimensional Google Maps view.
My problem with ego is this: it lies. It tells us that we are good, right, and wildly important so that we can sleep well at night knowing that we are the main character in the production of life. Only in ego death can we lose our attachment to this idea; only then can we understand ourselves as a tiny piece of an immensely, incomprehensibly large narrative of everything that has ever happened to anyone anywhere in which we are not the protagonist.
To say that we live in an ego-driven time is not groundbreaking; it’s a cold take. The ego is a central character in neoliberal identity politics.
“Neoliberal logic assumes that the fundamental unit of society is the individual, and I would say the abstract individual,” revolutionary activist Angela Davis said in an interview with Democracy Now!. “That logic fails to recognize that there are institutional barriers that can not be brought down by individual determination.”
Capitalist, imperialist society is built on division, on hierarchy, on the idea that the fleshy exteriors that hold our mind and spirit should define the ways we are allowed to exist. Society tells us what we are and what that means for us, like sticking a barcode on the skin of a naturally occurring fruit — “The scanner says you’re a green pepper and you are worth 89 cents.”
Yet, those of us that resist that hierarchy still feel the temptation to lean into the labels. As a bisexual woman, the acceptance of my queer identity was in many ways a freeing awakening. It helped me make sense of a lifetime of strained interactions with my own gender and sexuality and the ways in which I feel non-normative regardless of the gender of my current partner or if I have a partner at all. However, the same label brings me a constant compulsion to prove that it fits — that I am queer enough for queer spaces after a lifetime of not feeling straight enough for straight ones. The very essence of queerness is a rebellion against prescribed identity, yet we yearn to name our alternative identity — to find a box for ego rather than killing it.
Ego lies by distracting us. It tells us that our identity is the root of our problems and that broad acceptance of our identity is a cure-all without addressing the larger context that makes elements of our identity hard. As a queer person, I am told that Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is liberation while the average trans woman of color in American does not live to be old enough to run for president herself. Yet, the success of one gay man masquerading as a Kennedy feeds my queer ego with the assurance that I, in theory, could do the same. This increased possibility for my own power flashes before me — a shiny golden tease meant to satisfy my desire for material change. Yet, as one ascends to the height of power, the rest of the community, especially those at the intersections of multiple oppressed identities, remain largely unchanged. No amount of rainbow decal-ed police cars change the prevalence of transphobic violence, the violent impact of the criminalization of sex work, the fate of trans people in prisons, or the desperate need for guaranteed housing and healthcare for queer people who face higher risks of job, health and housing discrimination and unhealthy dynamics in family homes. These appeals to our identity — our ego — are largely meaningless.
For his 2020 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders touted the notably anti-ego slogan “Not Me, Us.” While personal anecdotes have become standard political ammunition for candidates who want to prove that they’re “just like us,” Bernie won my support in part because of his reluctance to center himself and his own identity when that time could be spent discussing issues. While I and many other Bernie supporters continue to be critical of many of his actions, I have seen the message of the slogan continue.
The COVID pandemic offers a big challenge to American cultural beliefs — it asks us to see ourselves as members of a community rather than rugged individualists. COVID shows us in real-time how our existence impacts everyone we come into contact with, whether we admit it or not. It challenges the illusion of our independence and our belief that what happens to us is the result of our actions alone. When we challenge this idea and acknowledge that we are all at the whim of outside forces, we threaten to disrupt a society built on the myth of meritocracy — that is, the belief that good people have good things because they made good choices by nature of their essential goodness. In contrast, we admit that one person’s good choices don’t protect them from external forces. One person can wear a mask every day and still fall sick when the person next to them in the produce section does not; can you still believe we don’t all deserve healthcare?
Ego and individual identity protect us from the uncomfortable truth that we are all connected — that every human, every animal, every shrub rooted in the median of the highway and weed growing through the cracks in the sidewalk are descended from the same single ancestor, likely a single-celled organism that found itself on this massive rock longer ago than we dare to imagine.
In the early days of the internet, there was hope it might become a worldwide community that allowed us to break the shackle of individual perspectives. Yet, forums and chat rooms gave way to personal blogs and social media platforms, and the internet became yet another outlet for ego and consumer culture. Social media allows us to construct our individual identity and to brand ourselves to the extent that my most recent selfie feels more me than my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Yet, online paradise is not yet lost. While millennials used social media as a means to brand themselves and #grind for personal gain, trends suggest Gen Z is more likely to roam in digital anonymity and use platforms to share knowledge and forge community. Throughout the month of June, I witnessed social media used to organize, educate, and share resources in support of Black Lives Matter. It’s naive to deny that the desire to protect ego — to be perceived as good — played a part, but a spirit of mutual aid was infectious nonetheless.
Ego death is essential to the continuation of anti-racist work. For too long, individually minded Americans thought of racism as a personal failing rather than a collective one. Racism is not a personal decision so much as an ingredient of the post-colonial soup we’re all marinating in. We can either face each day challenging what we’ve been told about our identities, challenging the ways that society has been structured to let white people continue to believe that we are the main characters, or be complicit.
“All men [and women] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” Martin Luther King Jr. preached. “Whatever affects one directly affect all indirectly.”
Ego death sounds violent, but, in truth, it’s a peaceful surrender. By releasing our need to be right and good and our need to be centered, we see the world with more love and understanding. We are connected to everything around us; improving the conditions of those in need improves the wellbeing of the collective, especially as people across identities struggle against the same forces of greed and hierarchy. We do not exist as we think we do; we do not exist in isolation.
About the Author
Victoria Middleton (she/her) is a third year student at The George Washington University studying journalism and mass communication with a minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies. She discovered her love for writing as a little girl, typing fairytale stories on her parents old Dell and printing them out before taping them into glitter-glue-encrusted cardboard covers. These days, she thinks honest and fully developed stories about women are even better than fairy tales. When she’s not scheming against the male hegemony of the media industry, she can be found thrifting, watching cult films and TV and badly dancing to good music. She has been known to get overly excited about intersectional feminism, astrology and David Lynch.
