When Ego Unravels: Presence Outlasts Performance
by Maria Gray
The Ache of Abundance and the Collapse of Ego
Transitions are difficult not only because of the ache of abundance - the energy, wisdom, and imagination that remain with no obvious place to land.
They are also difficult because of what falls away: the scaffolding that once held our ego and identity together.
Ego whispers: I matter because I build. I matter because I lead. I matter because I am admired and needed.
When the scaffolding falls away, what follows is not only absence, but a quiet humiliation - the unease of no longer being who we once were, nor who others expect us to be.
The Sword Snapped in Two
It reminds me of the French Foreign Legion ritual, when a disgraced soldier’s sword is snapped in two before his peers.
The blade that once symbolised honour, strength, and belonging is broken in a single motion. The pain is not in the metal shattering, but in the public stripping away of identity.
The man is left standing, exposed, without the very symbol that once defined him.
This is what transition can feel like. The sword may not be literal, but the effect is the same: the roles, titles, or achievements that once protected us are gone. And what remains is a kind of nakedness.
The instinct is to cover it quickly - to rush into busyness, to prove we can still perform. However, sooner or later even that no longer matters and we are left with the deeper work: to live without the sword, without the scaffolding, without the story that once secured our place and defined us.
As Ryan Holiday reminds us in Ego Is the Enemy, ego clings to the stage, resists humility, and mistakes applause for value.
It pushes us to overestimate our importance, to measure worth by doing rather than being. Which is why, when transition strips away the familiar symbols of identity, ego panics.
The unravelling feels like loss, even humiliation, and we grieve.
Tolstoy’s Judge and the Tenderness of Gerasim
Tolstoy captures this unravelling with brutal clarity in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Ivan, a respected judge, built his life on career, status, and social approval. But illness strips it all away. As he weakens, he suffers not only from pain but from the humiliation of no longer being who he once was - a man admired, useful, important.
His colleagues speculate about promotions. His family grows impatient. The scaffolding crumbles.
Yet in his final days, Ivan glimpses something different. He finds tenderness in his servant Gerasim, who cares for him without pretence. And he realises that meaning was never in the applause of society but in the simple experience of love and presence.
He dies in peace - not because he regained his role, but because he discovered that being with mattered more than doing for.
From Contribution to Connection
And perhaps this is the paradox of transition. The unravelling of ego feels like loss, even humiliation. Yet in the exposure it creates, another possibility emerges.
We discover that contribution is not the only measure of a life. Purpose may give way to meaning. And meaning may be found in connection - the quality of our presence with others, not in the records we set or the titles we hold.
How we live on in others is not only through what we built, achieved, or contributed. It is in how we were experienced - the imprint of our being, not just our doing.
Presence Outlasts Performance
A dear friend and colleague recently suggested that my personal drive to contribute, to be generative, might be part of my own internal script. At first, I resisted: What’s the point if you are not contributing, not somehow efficient?
And then I thought of my father.
He is a dedicated, prolific scientist, always immersed in ideas. When I was growing up, dinner table conversations often circled around his theories and discoveries. Even now, when I visit, he prefers to share his latest thoughts rather than linger on the ordinary rhythms of daily life.
Yet the moments I cherish most with him have nothing to do with science, or his contribution, or efficiency. They are the moments when he simply stroked my head, called me “Donya” with affection, and let his warmth and love flow through his hands.
In those moments, his presence spoke more than any idea, more than any achievement.
That is what remains. That is what lives on.
Invitation
Perhaps this is what transition invites us to see: the legacy we leave is not only in our work, but in the felt sense of being with us.
Presence outlasts performance.
Where in your own story have you felt the scaffolding of ego fall away? What did you lean on instead?