Breathing in the Void: Ego Death Through the Lens of Virgin

Virgin Album Cover.

"I wanna punch the mirror. To make her see that this won't last."

Somewhere between collapse and becoming, there’s a space no one prepares you for, a space where the self dissolves, where nothing feels real, and everything you thought you were drifts like dust in the air. It’s called the dark night of the soul. It’s called ego death. And it is not one moment, it is a season, a stretch of your life that doesn’t give you clear edges, only fragments.

"I'm scared to let you see into the whole machine, leave it all on the field."

Ego death is the undoing of everything you ever believed made you, you. It is not graceful. It is not cinematic. It is terrifying in its quiet unraveling, the slow peeling away of identity until you don’t know where your skin ends and the air begins. It makes the world feel paper-thin, and you become both a ghost and witness to your own undoing. The self you clung to dies and if you let it, something new can rise in its place.

Lorde’s new album Virgin sings directly from this liminal space. Each song feels suspended in the aftershock of transformation, the kind of emptiness that is not absence, but possibility. The sound is stripped down, intimate, aching. She doesn’t rush the emptiness, she honors it. The lyrics float, hover, exhale.

"When you’re carrying a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

I recognize this space because I have lived in it too. My own dark night of the soul stretched across months. It wasn’t a single night of shattering, but a thousand small deaths: the slow erosion of certainty, the peeling away of identities I built to be liked, to be loved, to be seen. Some days I felt like a stranger inside my own life, moving through rooms like a shadow. The poems I wrote back then—lines about being made of glass, about forgetting my own name—feel like messages in a bottle from someone drowning and learning to swim at the same time.

"I didn’t think he’d appear. Let’s hear it for the man of the year."

My ego death didn’t arrive quietly—it happened after I encountered something I once believed could only happen to other people. A kind of evil I thought would never actually touch me. But when it did, when it cracked my world open, it felt like my skin no longer belonged to me. I moved through time as if underwater, as if I was running in slow motion for months on end. The only things I could hold onto were my name and the town I came from, everything else dissolved.

"How I hope that I'm remembered, my gold chain, my shoulders, my face in the light."

I used to feel everything so deeply I thought it made me weak. But during my ego death, I couldn’t feel anything at all, and that was the sharpest loss of all. It was like breathing at high elevation and wondering why you’re not gasping for air. Realizing that maybe I wasn’t much more than dust, that maybe I never was.

And yet, in that center space, the one where you realize you could vanish and the world would keep spinning, something strange happens. You hit the center of it, right on target, and suddenly your eyes are open. Open to everything you’ll ever be able to perceive, everything you’ll ever be. It’s not comfortable exactly, but it’s clarity.

"Your metal detector hits my precious treasure, I’m nobody’s daughter. Yeah, baby, I’m free."

When I first played Virgin, I felt the soft ache of recognition. Lorde captures the texture of ego death, the way it both breaks and rebuilds you. The way it strips you bare but leaves you with an odd tenderness for the world. The album doesn’t try to tie things up. It breathes alongside the discomfort. It reminds me that letting go isn’t something you do once, it’s something you practice over and over until the sharp edges dull, and the ground beneath you steadies.

I think about the girl I was before unraveling and the girl I am now. I still don’t have answers. I still get scared. But I no longer believe I have to outrun the darkness. Sometimes you have to sit inside it, let it seep through your fingertips, and let yourself be remade without knowing what comes next.

"If I'm fine without it, why can't I stop?"

That’s what Virgin reminds me: ego death isn’t the end, it’s a threshold. Crossing it messy, scared, unsure doesn’t make you weak. It makes you alive. The anger I carried before, those moments when I could feel it, didn’t completely disappear when I unraveled, but it subsided to a place where I can now stand on my own.

I sat down and took it all in. And in that moment, stripped down to breath and heartbeat, I was most human. I survived , not untouched, but changed, and that is almost the best part.