“The fact is, I’m scared of relinquishing my identity. But surely anxiety about losing my identity doesn’t make sense: I’ve already experienced what that feels like. Shaking off all the layers of self that I’d accumulated in my lifetime, like the layers of an onion, was a necessary step to passing through the doorway into the Light. All that was left was a name that no longer belonged to me and I’d shrugged that off too. So why should I feel anxious now? Isn’t this what I crave? To get closer to the state I was in inside the Light. Or was losing my ego actually a traumatic experience? Seventeen years spent constructing my identity and when I relinquished it, I was left only with the knowledge of how flimsy and insubstantial it all is. The scaffolding we build for ourselves is rickety, it has no foundation and it’s so easily demolished. Is that why I felt like an alien when I came back to earth? Or why, finding myself surrounded by crowds in the high street, I’d felt as fragile as a moth? Or why I suffered panic attacks in the lecture theatre packed full of other students? I can see a pattern again. I suppose it can’t be healthy in this life to abandon your identity all in one go as I’d been forced to, flying towards the doorway of Light. There are reasons we all spend years insulating ourselves from each other in the first place: survival. Some people grow thicker and thicker layers of shell simply to stop others getting through. I’m trying to do the opposite: to remain open.”