The Woman Beneath The Noise 🌸

I’ve had to do something over the last few years that I genuinely wouldn’t wish on anyone: pick myself apart. And I don’t mean the cute “I’m finding myself” version where you buy a new journal, light a candle, drink some tea, and suddenly understand the meaning of life 😂 I mean really pick myself apart. After everything I experienced through my breakdowns, I was left staring at pieces of myself and asking some uncomfortable questions. What part of this is actually me? What do I believe? What do I actually want? What is intuition? What is fear? And maybe the hardest question of all: what is my identity, and what is my ego?

I used to think ego simply meant arrogance. Someone who thinks they’re better than everybody else, walking around with their chest puffed out like they’re God’s gift to humanity. But ego goes much deeper than that. Eckhart Tolle talks about ego as the mind-made version of ourselves, the identity we construct from our thoughts, our past, our roles, accomplishments, failures, possessions, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It’s that little voice constantly narrating everything: They don’t respect me. I need to prove myself. She’s better than me. What if they don’t like me? What if I fail? What if I’m not enough? And Lord have mercy, mine apparently came equipped with a microphone and surround sound 😂

The more I’ve learned about ego, the more I understand why so many spiritual teachings warn us about becoming consumed by it. If I had to explain it through my own faith, I would say ego is one of the easiest places for darkness to get a foothold. It feeds on comparison, pride, jealousy, fear, control, resentment, the need to be right, the need to be seen, and the constant desire to prove ourselves. But sometimes ego doesn’t sound arrogant at all. Sometimes it says, Everybody hates me. I’m worthless. I’ll never be good enough. That’s something I never understood before. Thinking you’re beneath everyone can consume your identity just as easily as believing you’re above everyone. Either way, your entire existence becomes centered around the story your mind has created about you.

My breakdowns stripped away parts of my identity that I thought were permanent, and there was absolutely nothing glamorous about it. When you’ve experienced your own mind becoming a place you couldn’t completely trust, you start questioning things most people probably never have to think twice about. One of the hardest and most important things I’ve had to learn is that a thought existing inside my head does not automatically make it true. Thoughts can be loud. Fear can be convincing. Ego can be convincing. Pain can be convincing. But convincing does not always mean true.

So now I try to ask myself different questions. Is this coming from love or fear? Am I responding because something genuinely goes against my values, or because my pride got hurt? Do I actually want this, or do I want people to see me having it? Am I protecting a boundary, or am I trying to win? Am I listening to intuition, or am I listening to an old wound that learned how to disguise itself as intuition? WHEW. 😮‍💨 That last one will humble you real quick. Healing for me hasn’t just been about becoming happier. It’s been about becoming more aware of what is happening inside of me before immediately believing it or reacting to it.

Something from Tolle’s teachings that really stuck with me is the idea that if I can observe my thoughts, then there is something deeper within me doing the observing. I don’t have to become every thought that crosses my mind. Maybe that awareness is where I’ve slowly started finding myself again. I’m not simply my job title. I’m not photography. I’m not motherhood. I’m not being a wife. I’m not my accomplishments, my failures, my worst days, or even the worst things that have ever happened to me. Those are all pieces of my human experience, but they are not the entirety of who I am.

We start building identities almost from the moment we’re born. Be successful. Be pretty. Be productive. Be liked. Make money. Get married. Buy the house. Have the babies. Keep up. Don’t fall behind. Make everybody proud. We collect labels and expectations until sometimes we can barely hear ourselves underneath all the noise. And lately I’ve found myself wondering: Who was I before the world started telling me who I needed to be?

Maybe that’s part of what my life has been trying to teach me. My breakdowns felt like complete destruction while I was living through them, and parts of those experiences truly were destructive. But they also forced me to examine a version of myself I probably would have carried forever without questioning. I’m still sorting through it: ego versus intuition, fear versus discernment, identity versus labels, reaction versus truth. I certainly don’t have it mastered. My ego still shows up. She’s dramatic. She’s opinionated. And occasionally she wants to write a twelve-page dissertation, complete with exhibits A through Z, explaining exactly why she is right 😂

The difference now is that I’m learning I don’t have to hand her the steering wheel. I can notice a thought without becoming the thought. I can feel anger without becoming anger. I can experience rejection without making rejected my identity. I can make a mistake without deciding failure is who I am. I can even outgrow versions of myself without hating the woman who once needed them.

Maybe killing the ego isn’t really about destroying part of ourselves. Maybe it’s about taking away its authority. Letting the noise become quiet enough that something deeper can finally be heard: faith, love, presence, compassion, truth, God, and the soul underneath all those labels we’ve spent our lives collecting.

I don’t think I’m trying to become someone anymore. I think I’m slowly trying to remember who I was underneath everything I thought I had to be. And maybe that’s the wildflower lesson in all of this. Strip away the labels. Stop comparing blooms. Quit asking permission to take up space. Sink your roots into something real and turn toward the light!