Let It Collapse: Grief, Liberation, and the Death of the False Self
Let It Collapse: Grief, Liberation, and the Death of the False Self
There are parts of us that were never truly ours. They were built to please, to survive, to pass. Stitched from fear, performance, mimicry. Accepted. Rewarded. Even loved. But they were not us. We are constellation-people, some stars we chose, and some were forced into our sky. Identity, most days, is just a survival costume, choreographed in the shadows of empire, stitched for legibility, worn so we don’t get disappeared.
Life, if you listen closely, is always inviting us to shed these false selves. To collapse every version we built in response to fear, domination, or the desperate longing to belong. This shedding happens minute by minute, breath by breath, until what’s left is not more, but less. And in that lessness: truth. Breath. Belonging. It is an unbecoming. A return.
This undoing is not conceptual. It is cellular. It shows up in the body first, tight jaws, smiles that hurt, silence that tastes like metal. It shows up in our relationships, when intimacy becomes exhausting or when we confuse being needed with being known. Collapsing the false self is not a glow-up. It is a death. And like any death, it brings grief, silence, disorientation. It cracks the voice. It strips away applause. It asks: Who are you when no one is watching?
Still, we were never meant to carry these layers forever. They were scaffolding. Temporary skins. We wore them to avoid exile, to survive violence, to navigate the unbearable loneliness of nonconformity. Especially under colonialism. Especially under capitalism. Especially if you are queer, racialized, disabled, poor, marked by systems that pathologize your very being.
The false self is not always ego. It is often armor. And over time, armor becomes a coffin. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon explored how colonized people internalize the image of the oppressor, adapting to imposed roles until the mask begins to feel like the face. We don’t become the mask by choice, we inherit it. Learn it. Then one day we forget it was never skin. But what has been performed can also be peeled away.
Beneath every gesture lives a chorus: ancestors, teachers, abusers, border guards, bosses. Some taught us how to stay alive. Others taught us how to stay saleable. They stitched our soft animal bodies into uniforms of acceptability, the accent you practiced to sound unthreatening, the smile you held through customs, the protest you swallowed because rent was due. These are not personal failures. They are survival technologies, engineered inside empires that demanded we trade our spirits for safety.
And while we begin to unweave these selves, something vaster is unraveling too. The Earth is collapsing under the weight of projections never meant to last. Not its fault, but ours. We told stories about what land was for: that forests were lumber, that rivers were waste channels, that animals were tools, that soil was real estate. These were masks forced onto the wild, and now the wild is rejecting them.
Pipelines rupture like undone corsets. Wildfires burn through zoning maps and colonial borders. Mushrooms blossom in fallout zones. Glaciers grieve. Species vanish. Heatwaves scream what our bodies already know: the performance is unsustainable. Just as we mourn the selves we outgrew, the planet mourns the roles it was forced to play. But in both cases, collapse is not just destruction, it is recalibration. It is compost. “Nothing is lost. Everything is transformed,” wrote Thich Nhat Hanh, and the earth knows this better than we do.
The collapse of the false self often begins with what I call the glitch. A moment when something doesn’t feel right. You say something, laugh a certain way, agree too quickly, and you feel it. This isn’t me. The mask slips. Your body twitches. The yes tastes like betrayal. That is the rupture. The first crack in the costume.
Then comes the grief. When the performance ends, mourning begins. You grieve the years. The roles. The silence. You grieve that some people only ever loved the mask. You grieve the versions of yourself that were never safe enough to be real. This grief isn’t dysfunction. It’s sacred. It’s the tremble that happens when truth finally touches skin.
After grief comes the retreat. Silence becomes sacred. You crave solitude. You say no without a reason. You leave spaces where you used to over-function or over-smile. Some call you cold. Others say you’ve changed. They're right. You are unbecoming. You are composting. Your body asks for water, for sleep, for soft light. The soil of your being begins to breathe.
Eventually, you return, but differently. You speak again. You show up again. But this time, you don’t offer the mask. You let people meet the living, flickering, complicated you. Yes, you might still reach for old patterns. That’s muscle memory, not failure. You begin to notice. You come back faster. You move through the world unarmored. Porous. Real.
And then it becomes a practice. There is no final transformation. No summit of selfhood. Just a rhythm. The wave of performance will rise again. Some days, you’ll ride it. Some days, you’ll let it pass. You learn to bless the partial courage. Some days you wear half the mask. Some days it burns like fire ants, and you drop it mid-sentence. This isn’t perfection. It’s presence. A tide you learn to trust, even when it pulls hard.
We tend to think of collapse as a singular event, a breaking point, a before and after. But collapse moves in many tempos. Some identities unravel slowly, over years. A gender no longer fits. A belief fractures. A path you once trusted begins to dissolve. These collapses are tectonic, slow, vast, deep-time shifts.
Others collapse by the minute. You’re mid-conversation and a self slips off. You walk into a room and realize you can’t be that version anymore. You collapse in motion and reassemble by instinct. No ceremony. Just breath.
Both are real. Both are sacred. Some of us are collapsing in long, glacial arcs. Others in rapid spirals, hour by hour, moment to moment, shedding selves like old skin just to stay honest. One is not deeper than the other. They are different frequencies of the same unraveling.
“Collapse” trends in headlines now, as institutions falter, climates destabilize, economies fray. But personal collapse has always been part of the story. What breaks outside breaks inside. When systems fail, we lose the identities we built to survive them. That loss can feel like dying, but it is also initiation. Into presence. Into integrity. Into a life unhooked from performance.
Time is not linear in this work. It folds. Some days you fall apart by the second. Other days you hold steady while everything else burns. This is not dysfunction. This is rhythm. This is the music of transformation. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” Krishnamurti reminds us. Collapse, then, might be the most honest response.
This is not spiritual fluff. It is radical. It is political. It is ecological. Every mask you retire removes a cog from the imperial machine. When you collapse the false self, you withdraw your labor from empire. You stop performing whiteness. You stop performing gender. You stop performing saleability. You stop offering your soul in exchange for safety. Capitalism depends on rehearsed identities. It cannot monetize what it cannot predict. A liberated nervous system is a supply chain disruption.
And what remains, when the mask falls away? Not a perfected self, but something truer. A laugh carried from your grandmother’s body, shaped by sugarcane and storm. The salt of an ocean that still lives in your blood. The breath rhythm you share with cedars, even when sirens scream. This is not ownership of land, it is participation in its breathing. This is communion.
Let this be a funeral for a costume you’re tired of wearing. Let the Earth be your pallbearer and your midwife. So step naked into the smoke. Ask the wind for your true name, the one written in mycelial script beneath concrete. Carry it back to the village. Build systems that recognize that name in others, human, river, stone.
Let it die. Let it rot. And what comes back will not be perfect, it will be wilder. Like a forest after fire, thick with seeds the blaze could not touch.
Michelle Carrera is a grief worker, death doula, and animal chaplain exploring the sacred, strange, and liberatory edges of loss. Through her platform, Grief and Liberation, she offers writing, resources, and gentle support for those moving through death, grief, and personal transformation. She also writes The Underground Dispatch, a speculative grief fiction series rooted in memory, earth, and imagination. Join the weekly Monday Mournings, explore offerings, or read the latest at www.griefandliberation.com.