The Anti-Hero's Journey
Admitting our mistakes is challenging for everyone, including the best of us. Naturally, we think that our decisions are right, and that our actions are valid; at least, within some framework of validity. It’s not reflexive to assess a degraded effect and come to the conclusion that WE are actually the cause. Whether there are ingrained neurological mechanisms that handicap our accurate self-reflection, or if it is purely cognitive dissonance, the fact remains: we don’t like being at fault.
When bad things happen, our instinct is to look for someone or something—a physical representation of our pain and suffering—to direct the blame towards. In our desperation, judgement gets cloudy. In our panic, things aren’t what they seem. In our paranoia, reality begins to warp. We struggle to accept our starring role in this Hall of Mirrors, with an infinity of fingers pointed back at us.
What’s confusing—when viewed impartially—is that this behavior shouldn’t have any evolutionary weight. In this sense, protectionism is orthogonal to optimality, improving the accuracy of our world-view. Seeking Objective Truth pushes us in the right direction, and in turn, makes our lives easier and more enjoyable. So this clamping down, this inward retreat, this swelling of the Ego—it’s against our best interests if what we want is actually the optimal outcome.
Sociopaths aside, we can sense when our axiomatic house-of-cards is collapsing in on itself. We’ve all been gotcha-ed and found ourselves on the wrong side of a disagreement, yet some overpowering force seems to disable our rationality. We can’t admit fault or apologize or make things right—no amount of guilt and shame can override our self-preservation. An even deeper level of insidiousness emerges when this stonewalling is premeditated. In these instances, those who are highly intelligent and perceptive can mold their gullible external environment to satisfy their internal Machiavellian wishes. It is one thing when someone is simply ignorant about their wrongdoing, misinformed, or lacking the full picture. But it’s purely malevolent for those who have the wherewithal to understand that they are, in fact, wrong yet continue to double-down on that position. This is pathological. It’s denying the Objective Truth under the guise of subjectivity, while attempting to trap others in their orbit of disillusionment. It violates trust and denounces logic.
Is there anything more socially destructive?
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The reason I can speak about this topic with such fervor is because I’ve been the sinner. I’ve lied and cheated and gaslit and refused to compromise. I’ve yelled and cursed and belittled and mocked. I’ve been deviously obtuse and toxic and deceitful and manipulative. I’ve been selfish and cruel and narcissistic. I’ve neglected and traumatized and left destruction in my wake.
As the chickens came home to roost…As the piper demanded debts paid…As the tide began to recede on my impure life, I clung and grasped to anything I could that would absolve me of my evils. I fought the undertow, but it was too late; the swelling manifestations of my mistakes began to sweep me away. I was raked over the razor-sharp rocks of my lies. The weight of my betrayals crashed down on top of me. Yet, still, I resisted to the very end. It wasn’t until the last gasp of air was suffocated from that life was something new able to begin.
It took something of this magnitude to break me out of my reinforced, habitual behaviors. Once I washed ashore and all of the psychological scar tissue was dissolved, I could finally see how fucked up my life had become. More importantly, I could see that all of the suffering and pain around me was a product of my mutinous Ego. I doubled-down so hard on protecting this self’s insecurities, that I not only went down with the ship but tried to bring everyone else down with me.
However, I soon came to realize that this Elysian shoreline was merely a mirage. I had never made it out of the water. The turning of the tide was a dream; I was still the same person. My faux reformation could no longer buoy the density of my submerged wickedness. As I sank deeper and deeper, my fate was clear and unavoidable. But the descent was interrupted—my Ego found reprieve, a last-ditch pocket of solace. In this predictable act of self-preservation, I was cast aside. One fractured into two. But despite the fission, we were forever entangled.
Outwardly, my transformation appeared complete; it seemed as though the grotesque caterpillar had metamorphosed into the ethereal butterfly. But this was a trick—for my Ego proved quite resilient. It had no intention to submit to this eternal banishment without a fight. Rather than accepting its Promethean fate, my Ego sought to bide time in the shadows, where it could metastasize, strengthen, and prepare for its counter-offensive. My Ego knew that haphazardly shedding its shell of protection collapsed my psyche’s immune system, leaving me vulnerable and defenseless.
I call this the Illusion of Ego Dissolution. It’s the outward-facing narrative of improvement that we project in order to hide the nonexistence of actual change. We’re all capable of hiding our true nature in spurts; sometimes, even for quite a long time. This sleight-of-hand can be convincing to everyone around us, but there is no half-way when it comes to Ego dissolution. It’s binary—one or zero, black or white, yes or no. The signal cascades globally or dies out. We cannot permanently suppress who we are at the core. And the longer the Ego is held beneath the surface, the greater the resulting power it will inevitably emerge with.
So how do we wage this internal war against ourselves? How do we know when the threshold of change has actually been crossed? How do we know when we—or someone else—has actually conquered their Ego?
At this point, I will need to shift metaphors for effect…(please bare with me)
While enthralled in the illusion of my own Ego’s dissolution, I was able to contain it for a few sanguine months—but return it did. After its triumphant and vengeful resurrection, I was powerless to its spite. It threatened to consume me, to dominate me, to ruin me in any and every way that was left to be ruined. As I resisted, my Ego fought back harder. As I erected protective walls, my Ego tore them down. As I hid, my Ego sought. As I struggled, my Ego tightened its grip.
With no other recourse, I surrendered.
I relinquished control.
And then something strange happened…
The world seemed to open up in front of me. I could feel the stranglehold beginning to loosen. There was something—some unseen force—prying the long, bony fingers from around my neck. Light began to warp and reality expand. And then I understood, in every fiber of my being, that this was the only way.
My Ego had to fall across the event horizon, be swallowed by the unknowable abyss of the black hole, crushed under inescapable gravity, exiled to this perpetual dungeon, spaghettified into meaninglessness, left with nothing but the company of its distorted reflection. Only after experiencing the frigid isolation and unending darkness of a billion light years did my Ego finally—permanently—concede.
And then, a new life—truly, a NEW life—was created.
At first, only abstraction; an egg of consciousness was snapped into existence. Birthed from the singularity, through a recombination of quarks and gluons, self and I, emerged an embryonic semblance of me. After an eternity trapped in the void, some twist of fate (or was it predestined?) catapulted me forward through a rip in the fabric of space-time. Slowly, I matured—an empathetic spark cast from the quantum flickering…Then quicker—replication, mutation and a primordial default-mode network. And faster still—I was belched from the wormhole, ready to fuse once again with me.
Yet, things were different here. Suddenly, I found myself in a parallel reality, a mirrored Universe. The was a peculiar unfamiliarity within the familiar—the vibrations in the celestial strings played a new melody.
Was it this place that was different? Or was it me?
Except, I wasn’t me.
I was not I.
There was an echo of my previous self, yet this incarnation was muffled…distorted…humbled.
Humbled by being stripped of Everything.
Humbled by the confrontation with Nothing.
Humbled by the sheer profundity of the Unknowable.
My Ego wasn’t vanquished—it was reborn, reinvigorated, rebalanced with Humility.
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Returning from this colorful detour down memory lane, we’re left with a canonical arc for the Ego’s Journey (forgive my blasphemy, spirit of Joseph Campbell).
The festering of the Ego is superseded by an impetus to reform—Usually, this will present as some type of life upheaval: a friendship ruined, an opportunity squandered, or as was my case, a marriage shattered.
This self-improvement impulse leads to the first bifurcation in the path; either the event is profound enough to snowball into chronic change, or we become trapped in the illusion of Ego disillusionment—In the former case, congrats…You can step off the merry-go-round! However in the latter, more aggressive measures will unfortunately have to be taken. The danger in the illusion comes from its indiscernibility, to those around you and even yourself. It can instill a perverse sense of temporary comfort, like applying pressure to a wound before ripping off the Band-Aid.
The illusion of Ego disillusionment only leads to one place—complete and violent Ego death. This penultimate step is the purification of the poisonous soul. It’s the culmination of a lifetime of tug-of-war between you and your Self. This ontological reset is the only way to descend beneath the lowest levels of your machine code to rewire the defective hardware. How this comes about in practice is extremelyvariable but almost always requires a transcendental experience. This could be finding God, a near-death experience, or if you’re like me, 600mcg of LSD. One must literally lose oneself to find oneself.
On the other side, Sisyphus reaches the mountain-top—Once all of the priors have been scrubbed, only a blank slate is left. For many, there is a dissociative component between their past and present that allows them to apply an objective lens to their old life. Astral projecting all of one’s failures and mistakes from the vantage point of an impartial observer creates distance between emotions and experience. A benevolent Ego can then be molded from the ashes, and the Anti-Hero’s Journey is complete.
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Excuse the over-the-top metaphorizing; I’ve never been able to properly articulate the exact depth and breadth of my personal struggles with the Ego. Maybe they’re meant to be ineffable to a degree, but nobody should have to experience what I’ve experienced to enact change in themselves. This cycle of death and rebirth, of destruction and growth, of old supplanted by new, nearly broke me. I almost lost my friends, my job, my mind, and my life—in many ways, I should have lost all of those things. But for me, this journey was necessary in order to rectify the mistakes of my past, to recalibrate my Ego’s influence, and to create a worthy life.
Nobody is fully free from their Ego’s gravity—round-and-round we all orbit. For most, they’re relatively comfortable existing in the slow-moving waves just beyond the point-of-no-return. But I can also look around at any given moment and see people who are in the clenches of the vortex, spiraling into oblivion, whether they know it or not. They are trapped, falling faster and faster as they get closer and closer to the Singularity. Their lack of humility is strapping them onto a nuclear bomb. Yet the way out is really so unbelievably simple. Stepping off the tracks doesn’t require divorce or depression or frying your brain receptors on a psychedelic trip—all you have to do it break out of the loop. The road to redemption can start with a single action.
Acceptance and admittance are the only prerequisites, then one must adopt to a true willingness and desire to change. When faced with the prospect of losing everything, the gravity of the situation quickly becomes clear. Humility is something that is so easy to detect in others but so impossibly hard notice through introspection. There are real and beneficial reasons why the Ego exists: self-preservation, autonomy, and drive to succeed. But left unchecked, it can indiscriminately set everything ablaze.
“I’m sorry.”
“I was wrong.”
“I take responsibility.”
The above phrases carry unparalleled emotional baggage. Each word tastes like poison, and they drip out of our mouths as if whispering a curse. But once they’re dispatched into the ether, everything settles down. The Universe calms.
Peace is only ever an act of humility away.
DISCLAIMER: Bryce Calvin is not a doctor or registered dietitian. The contents of this document should not be taken as medical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health problem - nor is it intended to replace the advice of a physician. Consult your physician on matters regarding your health. Materials in email transactions are not to be shared.
Beautiful