07/14/2026
"My ego...looks like being the first one in line to undercut my work so no one else can."
John Roedel - your words take my breath away.
“You need to undergo ego death,” a traveling mystic in blue jeans told me last summer while we shared a meal together at a fancy retreat center.
She was wearing the kind of orthopedic sandals that suggest she’s seen the Dalai Lama and also a very good podiatrist.
I picked at a giant piece of tofu that was shaped like Vermont as I pondered her suggestion. I decided right away that I didn’t like it.
Neither did my ego. We both voted against the proposition.
I broke the news to her.
“Death? What about Just an ego time out?”” I countered like a plaid-clad lawyer negotiating a plea deal for a shady client.
I was prepared to offer her a weekend of mindfulness and perhaps a slightly more expensive yoga mat if she’d just let me keep my personality’s security guards at the door.
The lady, whom I had just met in the vegan buffet line, didn’t smirk at my comment in the way I had hoped she would.
She leaned forward with both elbows on the table and looked across at me, her brown eyes widening like two well-fed sponges.
“No,” she said. “You are ruled by your ego. You can’t let rule inside of you anymore.”
I was offended. Me?
Ruled by my ego?
Simple, humble me?
A buffoon of a man who doesn’t submit his poetry to literary agents because it feels too ambitious?
A 50-something man who treats a “Like” from a stranger in Ohio as a terrifying brush with global fame?
Me?!
The man who self-deprecates so viciously I’ve become my own 19080’s movie schoolyard bully?
Me?!!
The poet who sometimes forgets to put his own name on his poems when he he shares them with the world?
Egomaniac?
Me?!
No way. I barely like myself. How could I be one of them?!
But something quiet inside of me who sits in the back row of my conscious raised their hand in agreement.
That hand stayed up Long enough that I wanted to swat it down with a laminated retreat schedule.
Because here’s the scoop….
I had just met this woman. Thirty minutes earlier she was a stranger with a name tag and sensible arch support.
Now she was mapping the load-bearing walls of my inner life while chewing roasted beets.
She told me she was traveling the country collecting spiritual experiences the way some people collect refrigerator magnets.
Sedona.
Esalen.
Omega.
A sound bath in a yurt that cost more per hour than my first car.
She said the cancer inside of her had made everything urgent. She was running out of time and had no interest in being gentle with people who still thought they had plenty of it.
Which explained why she skipped the warm-up questions and went straight for the artery.
“I heard you read your poetry last night.”
“You were there?”
“No,” she said. “I was outside the door.”
She told me she wasn’t part of my retreat. She had just been walking down the hallway, heard my voice, and stopped. She said she leaned against the wall and listened.
She said my poetry made her cry.
I felt that small, shameful bloom of relief. That familiar hunger of my insatiable vanity being briefly fed.
Then she continued.
“And then,” she said, “the way you apologized for them made me cry again.”
I asked her what she meant.
“You kept undoing yourself,” she said.
“After every poem, you rushed to make yourself smaller. You made jokes that stepped in front of the feeling. You spoke as if you were embarrassed by your own voice. As if you needed to reassure the room that you weren’t about to take up too much space.”
She paused.
“That,” she said, “is also ego.”
That’s when our conversation turned.
Because the truth is, my ego doesn’t initially show up like arrogance.
My ego is a perverse version of humility that I have weaponized against myself. It looks like being the first one in line to undercut my work so no one else can.
It looks like me saying:
“Oh, this old thing?”
about the one damned thing I’ve bled for.
My ego looks like me refusing to name my hunger because I’m afraid that wanting anything out in the open will make me unbearable.
I don’t usually confess this outside the furry snuggles of my ever-patient sheepdog priest, Ralph:
I am terrified of being
seen without a buffer.
Without humor running interference. Without humility clearing its throat before I open my maw to speak.
I learned early that
being small was safer.
That likability could pass for belonging.
That if I stayed agreeable and poked fun at myself, I could exist without provoking rejection.
So when she said “ego death,” what I heard was “exposure.”
A call for me to end my existence of hiding in plain sight. What I heard was….honestly, I stopped hearing anything. My ears were ringing like I’d been glove-slapped by an angel wearing sweatpants.
I had been.
She was talking about full blown emotional nakedness.
I looked at her then. Really looked. Like we were old besties who hadn’t seen each other since college graduation.
Here was a woman in her mid-seventies. Cancer pacing her like a clock she could hear ticking inside. Still showing up to hallways and buffets and saying the truest thing she could before time ran out.
She wasn’t trying to wound me. She was just in a hurry…cancer had eaten her patience for watching a grown-assed man hide behind his fear of claiming his own life.
“Your ego,” her voice dropped an octave,
“isn’t protecting you. It’s keeping you from the last room.”
That did it. Bingo bango bongo.
Because I know that room.
I only enter it when I’m cracked open enough to stop performing my tightly rehearsed survival dance.
It’s where I admit that I want to matter. That I want my voice to stay in the air a moment longer.
That I don’t want to apologize for being here.
I didn’t tell her any of this, of course. I’m often mute with cowardice.
I just nodded and took
another bite of Vermont.
The work continues….
(“the last room” by john roedel)
photo by Peter Harrmann
