Being Human in Public

Adrienne and the experience of ego death

I love the album Being Human in Public by Jessie Reyez (it's what inspired the title of this post). I also love the album Ego Death by the Internet. And I only like being called Adri by the people that know me.

Those are 3 random, mundane facts. But if you were speaking to me about a year ago, I would have been unable to express such sentiments with genuine conviction. I felt so lost, that I couldn’t even express my likes and preferences with confidence. Not that I didn’t know these facts, more so, that I felt so riddled with doubt. What I am sharing isn’t exactly profound or philosophical. In fact, it feels like the antithesis. It is personal, it is vulnerable, it is my experience of ego death.

What is ego death?

It refers to a loss of sense of self that is triggered by psychedelic usage. 

The ‘sense of self’ depicted by the movie, Inside Out 2

What was ego death for Adrienne?

I have never used psychedelics so my ego death was a period sparked by life events whilst sober. I experienced concurrent setbacks that were not extraordinary at all. But I was already thrown. Instead of contextualising these failures, I took them incredibly personally. It felt like I was in a perpetual cycle of loss. This resulted in me feeling like I didn’t know who Adrienne was.

What does that even mean? To really know yourself? 

All the pillars that were supporting my sense of self crumbled and each time a pillar was struck, it felt like a sledgehammer crashing into the features of my life that made me feel stable.

It wasn’t until recently that I was able to describe the period between September 2023 and October of this year as a phase of ego death. The thought never struck me. The idea of an ego death never occurred to me because I never thought of myself as having much of an ego. I would say until I was like 19, I was always filled with doubt. No matter what I achieved, I always questioned myself and my abilities. By 19, it felt like I had gotten to a place where I felt more assured. But, suddenly, the knowledge and life lessons I had amassed in my first two years of adulthood disintegrated into nothingness. In fact, it only served to confuse me even more because I could see the life I had built up, that I was clinging to so fiercely, begin to fade away.

What did Ego Death feel like?

Ugly. Uncomfortable. Unstable.

If this were an English GCSE exam, I would say that I had just written a semantic field of negativity. In my experience, that is what ego death was. This overwhelming, overpowering thing. It was ubiquitous, any good news was dulled by the melancholy that lurked in the corner; I knew something else was coming to rob me of my newfound joy. It was a sustained feeling of loss.

My family has always told me that I am too rigid, that I perceive life as black and white. And this is true, prior to this experience, I was very black and white. I was stringent on my morals and principles, and I thought this granted me a special type of superiority over everyone else. Because in a world of people who were malleable, I was steadfast and unmoving. I was so stubborn, fixed on the assumption that I had already learned all of life’s greatest teachings, that I believed I was equipped to deal with anything. And more importantly, that I would remain the same regardless of what I experienced.

If anything, this made ego death even more difficult. I went from being a slightly (only slightly) condescending know-it-all, to someone who wouldn't even recognise herself in the mirror. Who felt detached from her actions and significant life events. It made me self-conscious and detracted from the satisfaction of such events.

I let my anxiety take over. Instead of just giving into the moments, and enjoying the fleeting nature of life’s simple pleasures. I would override such feelings by questioning if people could sense the anxiety stiffening my body or if they perceived a hair out of place as a symbol of my decline just as I did. It made me hyperaware, anxious that everyone could witness my life turning upside down.

Anxiety has been a lifelong foe of mine. It manages to manifest itself all over my being - presenting in physiological and mental forms. I submitted to my mind when it told me I was destined to be a failure, that I had been foolish to allow a handful of personal accomplishments to convince me that I was anything more than someone who will always be out of their depth.

Lessons that I finally understand:

I have made it a point to make a distinction between learning and understanding in my personal life. I like to pride myself on my general knowledge, but the year 20 and even these early months of 21 have demonstrated that there is a clear difference between the two. I love learning, from everywhere. Whether it be from a tattered hardback book fished out from the Radcliffe Camera, or a digital lesson in a video essay or a substack post. 

But mostly, I love learning from what I like to call ‘table conversations’ in which I am sat surrounded by family members, surrounded by untold wisdom where they pass on their lessons and personal realities to me. Where all I can do is sit, listen, and hope the world stops just long enough for me to soak up as much knowledge as they are willing to give. In this cycle of ego death, I have tried my best to part ways with stubbornness. I understood I was only doing a disservice to myself by holding onto it, and have subsequently opened myself up to understanding, being willing to accept that I in fact do not know it all.

Learning has always been more enjoyable for me than understanding. I conceive the former as a more theoretical approach, in which you are primarily just listening and absorbing knowledge. But, the latter, understanding, is about putting theories into practice. It's seeing how much you are able to retain from what you have learned when tested.

I called this post ‘Being Human in Public’ not just because I love that album. But also because that is the essence of my experience of ego death and even my 20s thus far. The whole thing feels like its all rolled into one. Being Human is difficult, it is nuanced and it is complex. And doing it ‘in public’ means to get up everyday and to show up - for your family, for your job, for your friends, for your passion. Whatever it is.

Outside of the unsettling experience of ego death, is real life. And you have to continue showing up in ‘public’ as if nothing is really wrong because everyone is going through something and the world doesn't stop because Adrienne feels lost and not like herself. There are bills that still have to be paid, friendships to be maintained, experiences to live and books to read. 

The most significant lesson that ego death taught me is that reinvention is a constant. I only recently stopped loathing change, although, I am still not entirely fond of it. But it is inevitable, and most times it is not linear. You are not automatically rewarded after overcoming a challenge. It is a process with lots of different cycles and I am unsure if we ever really get to a finished end product, in which we are completely reinvented. It's more than cute face masks and walks and reading bell hooks.

Ego death gets ugly and really uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that sometimes you cannot sleep and you lose your appetite on certain days because you are so desperate to see what the point is, what the lesson is going to be behind the flurry of losses and failures. To see where you will end up after exhausting all the options. It is both brutal and necessary.