Ego Death on 9/11

September 2001. I’m a third-generation advertising guy, nearing 40, recently married, going bald, and just fit enough to get by. By day I work as an art director at a big-name agency; by morning, I meditate—rhythm of breath steadying me amid Manhattan’s roar. Six years sober in a Twelve Step community, where the faces are as familiar as family. Just another Tuesday: coffee on my breath, subway air thick with pastry and steel.

On my way to work, I overhear strange conversations in the subway car concerning extraordinary events happening on the streets above. Whispers turn urgent, phones appear in hands. As the train arrives at Union Square, I exit to find commotion at street level—faces tilted skyward, traffic frozen. Walking to University Place, I look downtown expecting to see the familiar Twin Towers standing sentinel against the blue September sky.

In that instant, my life begins to unravel. The towers are obscured by tremendous plumes of black smoke that billow against the cloudless sky. As a kid, my dad brought me downtown to watch the towers as they were constructed; they were bland, characterless boxes, yet as integral to Manhattan’s skyline as the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. I become aware of the people around me, frozen in tableaux of horror, some covering their mouths with trembling hands, others holding phones to their ears, shouting or whispering, I can’t tell. Sirens wail from every direction, their urgent screams slicing through the stunned silence.

Crowds have gathered on sidewalks and streets, bodies pressed together in wordless communion, peering up at a large outdoor advertising screen, showing repeating videos of the towers’ collapse. Gasps, screams, a shivering realization that if the occupants weren’t all evacuated, they were swallowed, crushed, entombed in a concrete grave. I don’t yet know that several firemen I’ve met at Alcoholics Anonymous are already gone, their laughter silenced beneath tons of steel and glass. I’m in a daze, or what I will later learn to be a dissociative state. Nothing feels real—the world suddenly rendered in watercolor rather than sharp focus. I no longer see objects moving in continuity but in discontinuous, scattered frames. Sounds are muted, cotton-wrapped; I can’t feel the ground beneath me, it seems like a lucid dream, for I am just as powerless to speak as in those nightmares where your voice evaporates when you need it most.

The subways are closed, all the bridges as well, the sole exception being the 59th Street Bridge, the only way back home to Brooklyn. It’s a long walk ahead of me, but there’s nowhere else to go but forward, with no clear sense of what “forward” means in a world suddenly turned inside out. I walk in a loose group of work colleagues, our usual banter about deadlines and clients now painfully irrelevant. There’s little, if any, conversation going on. When someone does speak, it’s barely above a whisper—as if raising our voices might break whatever fragile thread is holding us together in this new, terrifying reality.

I spend the months afterward still walking about in a trance, fully experiencing a crisis that peels back layers of myself I never knew existed. While New York’s bars fill with those numbing themselves to pain, glasses clinking in desperate toasts to lost normalcy, as a recovering alcoholic that option is not available to me. So I fall into what one psychiatrist diagnoses as a “post-traumatic episode” without any substance to ease the shock—raw nerves exposed to every painful stimulus.

And then comes the return of long-repressed memories from a childhood spent in a violent household, reactivated by my current state of helplessness, powerlessness, outright fear. They rise like ghosts from a disturbed grave.

Feelings of low self-esteem, suppressed during years of addiction and living on society’s margins, rush up from my abdomen in spasms that double me over when I’m alone. “You’re worthless, you’re a momma’s boy, you’re a waste.” My father’s home-from-the-bars drunken rants return as an unrelenting voice in my head, each syllable a hammer blow. I can hear the screams from my parents’ bedroom as if they’re happening right now, not thirty years past—the sound of breaking glass, of flesh striking flesh, of childhood terror.

My wife finds me shaking on the couch in a fetal position. I’m sweating through my T-shirt, gulping for air like a landed fish, in the grip of a panic attack, my stomach cement-hard yet churning with acid. In my mind, movie screens play horror films—images of being alone in the world, unloved, adrift in cosmic indifference. My life no longer makes sense. September 11 has pulled away the delusion of certainty, of safety, revealing a world where nothing is guaranteed, where everything can vanish in smoke as quickly as those towers fell. And what the hell am I doing with my life? Working in advertising—crafting lies about happiness in bottles and boxes!

The following months of 2001 alternate between numbness and self-hatred sharp enough to cut. There is so much healing needed, an ocean of pain to cross without drowning. My self-care consists of weekly visits to Buddhist centers where incense sweetens the air, daily Twelve Step meetings in church basements where coffee burns bitter in Styrofoam cups, and morning meditations on a cushion that never feels quite comfortable. Perhaps this routine would suffice for most people, but not for me—the foundations have been too thoroughly shaken.

On days I make it to work, I head straight to my office, closing the door behind me to separate myself from the busy, fluorescent-lit, red-carpeted hallways where life continues as if the world hasn’t fundamentally changed. I sit dazed before an improbably large desktop computer, lost in the virtual chambers of the early internet where banner ads flash with false promises. My life, which only a few weeks ago seemed to make sense, providing some form of coherence, has revealed itself to be empty, inconsequential, futile, thoroughly pointless. “Meet the new Toyorati Renaissance. A sleek, beautiful exterior with luxurious padded seating, and don’t forget that powerful 300-horsepower engine!” “Are you anxious? Depressed? Burnt out? Feeling like an imposter, or annoyed by everything? Emo-Numb™ is there for you.” This is what my life has become? Crafting slogans while the world burns?

This is what my life has become? Crafting slogans while the world burns?

Morning meditations are grinds, but I turn to them in the hope of finding the slightest foothold on sanity, a toehold on the cliff face of despair. Instead of observing thoughts like clouds passing through the sky as I’ve been taught, I resist them obsessively, trying to push them away with the force of will. Rather than listening to entombed fears, I crave numbness like an old addiction. I’m falling into the trap of using meditation as avoidance, a spiritual bypass, instead of greeting the dread, the inner shaming voices from which I’ve been running since childhood.

I experience, firsthand, a state of mind where no thought, emotion, or feeling can be put aside, distracted, alleviated; flooding images of a childhood spent lonely, yearning for friends, terrified of social groups—all my practice can offer is a way to hold these human experiences, each comprised of energies that must express themselves. Practice doesn’t allow me to gain distance from anything, but at least I’m learning how to “be with it, no matter how painful it is”—to sit in the fire without being consumed.

Desperation finally motivates me to seek out more support. I find a Buddhist therapist whose office smells of sandalwood, whose sessions create a safe space for sharing thoughts and feelings that feel too shameful to voice elsewhere. Session after session, I practice locating fears as they arise not only in my mind but in my stomach, chest, and shoulders—the geography of anxiety mapped on my body. I contact the long-buried feelings of a terrified 6-year-old shaking in bed as his drunk father arrives home, keys jangling like warning bells; I learn to console this child and provide him with a new sense of security that no one offered then. I rekindle studies in the Buddha’s teachings and seek retreats with monks who embody the kindness and balance I desperately need—their presence itself a teaching in stillness.

During this period, I find a Buddhist community, populated by others who, like me, grew up in punk circles and wound up covered with tattoos, and are recovering from substance dependencies, trying to make sense of the world; finally, I’m in a place where I feel I belong—where my history isn’t something to hide but part of the path that brought me here.

I’ve spent more days than I can count in the marketing profession, watching the city pulse below through plate glass windows as I craft campaigns for products nobody needs, the sky changing colors while I stay fixed to my ergonomic chair. Fifteen years of my life dedicated to convincing others that happiness is a matter of purchasing useless software apps and needless tech, that fulfillment comes boxed and shrink-wrapped. My business card states “associate creative director” and even “brand strategist,” impressive titles that suggest I possess skills of some value beyond making people want things they don’t need. The pay is fine—it always has been. I have enough to pay the mortgage on an apartment too small for its price and travel to places I photograph more than experience.

But then the world breaks open, spilling its messy truth. Suffering floods the same screens where I once pitched campaigns for soda and SUVs. Something shifts—quietly at first, then with the force of an earthquake. I feel it in my bones: a tectonic realignment of values. The old narrative begins to collapse. “Does any of this matter?” The question nags at me through meetings and missed deadlines. The Buddha once left behind a palace. I’m just trying to leave behind a brand deck. Yet the act feels no less radical. Even “quiet quitting” feels like a rebellion against the lie I helped sell. Every step away from that world is a step toward remembering what I truly am beneath the costume.

Walking away isn’t easy—fear clutches at my ankles with every step. Financial security has been my religion for so long that abandoning it feels like stepping off a cliff without knowing how far I’ll fall or what waits at the bottom. Yet something pulls me forward, a current stronger than fear. I remember how the Buddha himself left behind wealth and comfort to seek meaning in a world of suffering. Even the minimal effort it takes to mail it in, to quietly quit, feels beyond me—the performance too exhausting to maintain.

The Buddha once left behind a palace. I’m just trying to leave behind a brand deck.

So I slowly disentangle myself from the life I’ve built, unweaving the tapestry thread by careful thread. I sell the car that sits unused most days, give up the garage that costs as much as an apartment in some cities, take fewer and fewer remote gigs that pay well but hollow out my soul, learn to live with less, and, in the emptying, discover space for something new to grow.

Days unfold differently now, shaped by purpose rather than profit. I teach mindfulness to parolees from Rikers in a halfway house on Monday evenings, their faces initially skeptical, then gradually softening as they discover inner resources they never knew they had. I help run the Buddhist group on Tuesdays in a rented room that smells of incense and possibility, volunteer at an afterschool program where children’s laughter heals something ancient in me, mentor recovering addicts who recognize in my eyes that I’ve walked through the same fire. The pay is minimal, some days nonexistent. But this new life and sense of self nourishes me in ways my old salary never could, like comparing fast food to a meal cooked with love. I’m building connections that run deep, creating a web of relationships based on something real, not the transactional exchanges of my former life. When people ask what I do now, I stumble at first, unsure how to explain what a Buddhist teacher is in a world obsessed with titles and status. “I try to help others find out who else they can be,” I might say, the words feeling both inadequate and exactly right. But the truth is, I’m really finding that out for myself, day by surprising day.

I’ve built my life around who I thought I was—identity as a fortress against uncertainty. My job title. My relationship status. My political views. A social media presence carefully curated to reflect a person who doesn’t actually exist. I’m the musical one in my friend group, the creative strategist, brand storyteller, good neighbor, progressive with the right opinions at the right times. These labels feel solid, comforting, familiar as old furniture. But what happens when they suddenly don’t fit anymore? When the chair breaks under your weight?

Imagine waking up one morning and feeling like a stranger to yourself, your reflection in the mirror a person you barely recognize. It happens. Sometimes gradually, like a tide coming in, sometimes all at once like a lightning strike. The ancients knew about this—they called it different things in different tongues. Around 500 BCE, great philosophers—Heraclitus, Laozi, the Buddha—emerged who all pointed to the same truth: Clinging to what is unreliable causes suffering as surely as night follows day.

I remember my first heartbreak—the feeling of “who am I without them?” My identity was so wrapped up in being someone’s partner that separation felt like amputation. That was a tiny taste of ego death. But this goes deeper. Much deeper than romantic loss.

I think about what I tell myself in the mirror each morning, mantras so familiar they’ve become invisible: “I’m creative.” “I’m bad with numbers.” “I’ll never have a healthy relationship.” These feel like facts etched in stone, don’t they? But they’re just stories, narratives written in invisible ink. Stories that help me make sense of my life, sure. And they boost my confidence when they’re positive, a warm hand on the shoulder. Maybe the harsh, self-critical views can provide us with excuses when we’re struggling to meet our expectations—shields against trying and failing.

In those spaces between my old self and whatever comes next—that’s where ego death happens. It can feel like free-falling through empty space without a parachute. Terrifying. Disorienting. Like being lost in a city where I don’t speak the language, signs meaningless, no map to guide me home.

But here’s a secret whispered by those who’ve made the journey: It can also feel like freedom. Indigenous cultures created rituals for this—vision quests where young people stepped outside their known selves to discover something larger than individual identity, returning transformed. In the 1960s, a generation turned to psychedelics to break free from society’s rigid boxes, seeking authentic experience beyond social conditioning. Today, people travel to foreign countries where no one knows their name or history, dive into therapy that questions core beliefs, or join spiritual communities seeking the same transformation—death preceding rebirth.

Some try to speed up the process. Psychedelics can blast open the gates of perception like dynamite opening a sealed cave, overwhelming the brain with unfiltered sensory input that bypasses ordinary consciousness. Suddenly, the boundaries between me and everything else dissolve like salt in water. I merge with the universe, stars pulsing with my heartbeat. I disappear completely yet paradoxically feel more present than ever before.

It sounds mystical, doesn’t it? Sometimes it is—glimpses of something larger than words can contain. People return with profound insights—greater compassion flowing naturally, deeper connection to nature that transforms their relationship to the environment, less concern about status and money that once seemed so important. But these insights fade without integration, like dreams upon waking. Without practice. The old patterns creep back in when Monday morning arrives with its demands and expectations, the ordinary world reasserting itself.

And the forced approach comes with risks not mentioned in breathless articles about transformative experiences. What feels like enlightenment for one person might trigger paranoia or panic in another, psychic trapdoors opening unexpectedly. Especially if I’m predisposed to certain mental health conditions, the plunge can become a dangerous free fall without a safety net.

Buddhism offers a gentler path, less dramatic but perhaps more sustainable. Instead of tearing down my self-concept all at once like demolishing a building, I learn to see through it gradually, brick by transparent brick. Like slowly adjusting my eyes to darkness rather than being thrown into a pitch-black room and told to find my way. With various meditation and visualization practices undertaken day after patient day, I begin to notice how everything I take to be “me”—my body with its aches and pleasures, my feelings that rise and fall like waves, my thoughts that appear from nowhere like birds crossing the sky—is constantly changing, never static. Nothing stays the same from one moment to the next, not even the cells of my body or the neurons firing in my brain. There’s no solid core to grasp on to, no unchanging essence that defines me.

The ego doesn’t disappear in some dramatic explosion, a spiritual fireworks display. It becomes transparent, seen for what it always was—a useful fiction, a convenient shorthand, necessary but not ultimate. Like realizing the glass barrier I’ve been pressing against was never there at all, the limitation imaginary. Some days I’ll still cling to my labels and roles out of habit or fear. That’s OK. I’m human, navigating a world built on these conventions. But increasingly, I hold them lightly in open palms rather than clenched fists. I see them as helpful tools rather than absolute truths—maps but not the territory. When life inevitably changes, as it always does, I won’t shatter along with my old identity but flow like water finding a new channel to the sea.