I Welcomed Identity-Death Into My Life
And It Changed Me Forever
Death. Reading it. Writing about it. Seeing it. Hearing it. Dissecting it.
As much as people hate to admit it — we are obsessed with death. And for good reasons. Death, in whatever context you apply it, means the end of something. The final curtain call.
Like a shadow, death has accompanied humans hand-in-hand since our inception yet, with even with all of the technological and intellectual advancements we’ve made, we’re still as far from it today as our ancestors.
Death is still something that is feared avoided, ignored, numbed, buried, (literally and figuratively), and embellished. Kids aren’t taught about it until way too late in life after getting twisted accounts from well-wishing parents of heavens, playgrounds, mansions, and whatever other imaginary bullshit our society has taught us to use to cover up what we don’t know. What we may never know.
Or will we?
Death & It’s Multiple Meanings
Beyond the classical end-of-life scenario that death is infamous for, we experience death on a daily basis, practically all the time. Definitions often stick to a box but I’m a creative scientist, so I don’t stick to boxes.
There is no need to call this “redefining of death” because it’s more of an expansion of the definition beyond its original scope. When we expand the definition of death beyond the cessation of biological functioning to the end of… anything really, we can begin to recognize just how flexible we can be with language.
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As I was reading through Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s wonderful book In Love with the World earlier today, my curiosity peaked as I reached a section talking about “identity-death” and his prescription to treat the change of a job as a death of one identity. And the birth of another. Rinpoche himself then continues forth mentioning his own personal invitation of identity-death into his life to leave behind his old persona and external identities.
I was stunned a bit to see the words so simply and clearly put right in front of me. The idea of mourning the death of identity was not new to me but I hadn’t truly contemplated it before.
This moment of pause took me down a rabbit hole of memories as my mind instantly shuffled through the Rolodex of my life seeing if anything close to an identity-death had happened to me before.
Yes, it had. That was obvious.
But — had I ever truly allowed or practiced a grieving period after the shift from one identity to another?
No. I never thought of it because it wasn’t something I was ever taught growing up. And even though I had studied this in undergrad and in my yoga teacher training, applying the knowledge consistently is simpler than it sounds.
Identity-Death Examples
So perhaps the concept of identity-death may still be confusing. In this case, I’ll provide some examples from my own life to give some real-life scenarios that would fit into this. But to be honest, even the tiniest shift in letting something go is can be part of the identity-death concept.
Personally I’ve experienced identity-death in moments such as when:
- I decided to stop my bulimic habits of 10 years
- I experienced both sudden and drawn-out deaths in my family
- I decided I was not going to be a doctor, something which I spent 8 years preparing for
- I decided to leave my PhD program and “Master out” and go into biotech
- I decided to move from the east coast to the midwest with me, my fiance, and cat
- I decided to switch from business development to marketing to writing to teaching to mentoring
- I decided to follow my intuition over the endless blabbering of my mind
- I decided to no longer consume meat or dairy
- I decided to believe I was safe in the world no matter where I was
The list could go on, but it provides a range of life-long identity-deaths as well as short-term identity-deaths which will be relatable to most, if not all of you reading this. Why? Because identity-death is universal.
Mourning The Death of An Identity Is Essential
Besides our gender and sexual preferences, identity is made up of countless pieces that we pick up along the road of life. Personality traits, memories, quirks, you name it. But we become so reliant on our individual identity that once we have created a relatively consistent pattern of habits, we rarely ever want to change it even if it will save us.
Having an eating disorder for 10 years wasn’t something I chose to do. It was something that grew to take over me and my life. To be frank, I look back at my life and how it used to be and I am surprised I was able to accomplish so much while walking around drained of nutrients, love, compassion, and safety.
I was in my PhD program when I decided that enough was enough. It took many trials and tribulations, but it has been 5 years and I hardly recognize myself as an individual. Physically I am pretty much the same person. It’s inside where all the magical change occurred. The reason I bring this specific example up is because even though I was morphing and changing into a completely different person these past 5 years, I never gave myself time to grieve the old identity that got me through practically every important moment from the age of15 to 25. The most memorable time for people I’d say.
I was so laser-focused on achieving the end goal of healing myself fully, to get away from the horrid voice inside me that coerced me to do awful things to myself for a decade, that I blocked out as much of my youth as I could. This was how I was able to get over the old identity initially. However, I never really grieved. I just blocked out and forgot. And it worked for the first few years until I stepped back into my spiritual practice and the pain I hadn’t addressed came back in ten-fold.
I began to notice in my own life that I rarely sat down and felt the culmination of changes that had happened. Instead, I’d have random outbursts of emotion that I blamed on PMS or daily stress. It wasn’t until I had begun re-examining the yogic and Buddhist teachings of sitting with your pain that I fully could come to terms with the death of my identity.
An identity I carried with me, that weighed me down onto my knees, that tore me up from the inside out with acid and took me over a decade to discard. To recognize, accept, mourn, and dissolve.
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Latching onto identities is as natural as it is detrimental. No matter how new or how old. Not giving ourselves the space to grieve our old identities leads to all kinds of resistance in our physical bodies, our relationships, our emotions, thoughts, and life as a whole.
This resistance blocks the flow of life and we begin to suffer.
Comparing old identities to new ones.
Getting confused with when old identities show up in new forms.
We suffer because we are inevitably resisting the cycle of life and death.
So, What Happened When I Let An Identity Die?
I created space for the birth of something new.
I created room for something that has been developing slowly, maturing to set in roots.
An identity-death is not like a biological death per se because it rarely happens suddenly and in an instant. Instead, it is an uncovering that occurs over multiple moments of self-reflection and contemplation.
When I began to understand this and apply it to my own life, a feeling of newfound freedom and ease would set in. Through those moments of ease, flow would appear. And inspiration would come once again.
Yes — pain and torment would revisit and anger and hopelessness — but little by little, the pain lessened and acceptance would settle into the gap between deep, sopping inhales filled with tears and chest-burning exhales.
They may be ephemeral but these moments, if consistently repeated, will lead to a renewed sense of life, potential, and perspective. And with practice, can lead to an understanding of the real meaningless nature of identity, in a cosmos infinitely connected through invisible strings.