July 27th, 2026

Peeling Away the Myth 

of Who I am 

i thought the work was subtraction. i thought i understood that already — that the false self comes off like a garment, layer by layer, the way an onion gives up its skins one at a time until there is nothing left to peel and no core underneath, only the peeling itself.

it is a tidy image. it made the work sound almost pleasant.

~

this week the light found a layer i had not offered it. not a habit, not a resentment i already knew the shape of. a myth. a story about my own past that i had been carrying so long i had stopped calling it a story. i called it the truth.

i see now what the story was built to do. it let me stand in a version of my history where i was the one who suffered, the one who had been formed by what was done to me — and it left out, carefully, quietly, the places where i had done the forming. where i made decisions that served me and cost other people something. i did not forget those decisions. i filed them somewhere the story did not have to pass through.

~

the Gnostics have a word for the self built this way. hylic — the garment woven of fear and want, put on so early and so completely that it is mistaken for skin. i used this image before, in the Hymn of the Pearl, the prince who forgets his own royal nature the moment he puts on the clothing of the far country. i thought i understood that forgetting. i did not know i was still wearing a garment i had sewn myself, out of my own account of what happened to me.

Jung would call it persona — not a lie exactly, a mask necessary at first, worn to survive something, that calcifies until it feels like bone. the danger was never the mask. it was forgetting there was a face underneath it that the mask was never asked to answer for.

~

what undid the story was not my own effort. it was other people's truths, ones i had been quietly declining to hear because they did not fit the account i needed to be accurate. i had heard them before, i think. i had let them pass through without landing. this week they landed.

the Sufis call the self that resists this landing the nafs — not evil, just insistent, endlessly building a case for its own innocence. fana is what happens to the nafs when it finally stops being fed. not destruction. just the end of the feeding.

~

in the program we call this a fourth step, a tenth step, an inventory — and i had done these, honestly, i believe, as far as i could see. but the inventory can only find what the light reaches, and there was a room i had not let it into. this week the light got in anyway. not because i was more rigorous. because i finally stopped standing in the doorway.

now i see the shape of what i owe, and to whom, and it is not abstract. there are people i hurt while telling myself i was only surviving. the amends are not going to be about my growth. they are going to be about their accounting, not mine.

~

i keep wanting to say this is the hard part. it is not the hard part. the hard part was the not-knowing, and that is over. what is left is a road, ordinary and long, walked one honest day at a time. i have walked roads like this before. i know the pace it asks of me. patience, again, the same word it has always been.

the onion was never the right image. there was no pleasant infinity of skins. there was one particular myth, hiding one particular set of debts, and now there is daylight on it, and now there is walking to do.