Quiet Disintegration: Over-identifying Costs Too Much
On Reorientation Instead of Resolution
Happy New Year! I’ve been quieter here the past few months. This essay comes out of that silence.
A reflection on what dissolves when we stop over-identifying.
Am I over-identifying with everything?
I didn’t arrive at this question philosophically. It followed me quietly and relentlessly all year long.
Am I over-identifying and getting over-involved with my work, with other people’s pain, with systems that were never designed to hold me?
When the Body Speaks
Last summer, I screamed at the mirror when my reflection revealed two bald spots on opposite sides of my hairline. The bald patches didn’t appear slowly. Not imaginatively.
Noticeably!
I did what many of us do. I assumed the hair loss was chemical or medical. I blamed medication. I blamed timing.
But my dermatologist didn’t hesitate. My hair loss wasn’t medication-related.
It was stress. Lifestyle-induced.
And when she said it, my heart immediately felt heavy with sadness. Because if I was honest, there was only one source of chronic stress in my life. My job.
That realization scared me more than the hair loss itself. The worst had happened. I had allowed my job to impact my well-being. I always prided myself on railing against the expectations of corporate systems, the ladder, the climb. This realization, however, confirmed that I hadn’t escaped them at all. I fell prey to the same thing millions before me were subject to. I was ashamed, sad, and angry.
No job is worth my health.
No title is worth my body sending distress signals.
No career path is worth quiet self-erasure.
That doctor’s appointment cracked something apart in me.
As a recovering Type A, I immediately sprang to action. Or should I say, order? I started taking inventory of all the feelings and factors that contributed to my stress, both at and outside of my job.
I began to notice how close I felt to things that were never meant to live inside me.
Living Too Close to Everything
Every time I opened a social app, I felt pulled into manufactured proximity: political division, racial panic, gender wars, xenophobia, endless commentary disguised as truth. Far right versus far left. Us versus them. Always urgency. Always outrage.
People tell me to “curate your algorithm.” I’ve tried. But I think that advice assumes more control than we actually have.
The algorithm is porous.
Other people’s unfiltered engagement bleeds into our feeds.
Propaganda seeps through social ties, shared content, collective fear.
What unsettles me isn’t just the content. It’s the intimacy. Social media makes me feel too close to false truths. Too involved in conflicts I didn’t consent to. Too saturated with other people’s unresolved issues.
And that saturation extends beyond the screen, into how we relate to each other and ourselves.
Projection and the White Gaze
The longer I spend online, and in certain rooms, the clearer something becomes.
On top of racism, many non-white people carry internalized racism, misogyny, and xenophobia (you name it, they carry it) so deeply that it shapes how they move through the world.
There is a deep yearning to be closer to whiteness, whether in proximity, complexion, culture, or approval.
And when their self-rejection goes unexamined, it turns outward.
People become walking projectors. Of shame. Of hierarchy. Of someone else’s gaze.
Living under the white gaze is a relatively new experience for me. I grew up in a predominantly black country. That matters. It shaped my sense of self before (corporate) America ever touched it.
One of the places I feel most misaligned with the African American experience is how closely identity is formed in proximity to the white gaze. Having to interpret your beliefs and sense of self through that lens is a quieter form of oppression—one so normalized that many of us no longer recognize it as oppression at all.
What I missed most when I entered professional white spaces wasn’t comfort. It was context. A reminder that the white man’s world is not the whole world—and frankly, not the most expansive one.
I needed to remember how to love and honor black life outside white spaces. Through in-person friendships. Shared hobbies. Hosting. Creative practice.
“What I missed most when I entered professional white spaces wasn’t comfort. It was context.”
Career Anxiety in an Unnamed Recession
Outside of social media and its sub-realms, I took inventory of the instigating factors of stress in my work life. How does my career make me feel? Like many Millennials, I feel I did everything “right.”
Degrees.
Experience.
Hard work.
And still, I find myself quietly panicking about my future.
There are no jobs. Or there are jobs that don’t pay. Or jobs that evaporate mid-interview. We are living through a recession that no one wants to name, and the psychological toll of that ambiguity is profound.
Will I still have my job in six months?
Will AI make my skills irrelevant?
How can I stay ahead of the curve?
Will I lose everything and have to start again?
The uncertainty presses on the nervous system daily. It teaches over-identification as survival: cling harder, give more, prove value at all costs.
But that logic is corrosive and capitalistic.
This is how I started losing my hair. Not simply because I cared too much, but because I over-gave without establishing boundaries around what was achievable and what was not. Some of this I take full accountability for. Some of it sits well outside my realm of control.
I am a realist. Given the state of the job market, many of us are stuck in cycles of overextending and hyperperformance just to keep our jobs. This is the reality.
The challenge is learning how to live within that reality without sacrificing self.
Social Disintegration as Practice
After my last post on Substack back in September, I began to pull away. Not dramatically. Not angrily. Deliberately. I wasn’t only disintegrating from online spaces, I was exhausted by social spaces altogether. Tired from labor of all kinds: career, emotional, wellness. Tired of being available to everything.
Social disintegration, for me, is not about opting out of society.
It is about reclaiming my identity within the systems I still move through. I do not trust the systems I participate in, and that lack of trust requires a different posture. One that is more mindful, more bounded, less reflexive.
This is what that looks like in practice, so far:
Nurturing unpoliticised spaces
A village that looks like me, or is deeply allied with me. Spaces where I am not a symbol, an argument, or an educational tool.
(Shoutout to my monthly wellness group. We’ve been going three years strong.)
Leaving work at work
Some of us are programmed to over-give to under-paying careers. I am learning to log off properly. To leave my computer at the office on in-office days. To set alarms for signing out. To stop donating unpaid emotional labor to institutions that would replace me without ceremony.
Resting before I am depleted
Taking time off without waiting to collapse. Refusing the belief that rest must be earned through exhaustion or crisis.
Prompted by burnout and over-stimulation, I explored the idea of resting in a capitalistic America in my last post.
Spending less free time in predominantly white spaces
Not out of resentment, but out of recognition.
My nervous system remembers something older. Something communal and accepting. Something whole. Something where I am not “other.” I want more of that.
In a deeply racialized and politicized America, it became more important for me to carve out spaces that are purely my own as a wellness practice. I am returning to that.
Refusing performance
I am done performing the strong black woman.
The nurturing one.
The exceptional one.
Even for black people.
I love those archetypes, but I am no longer living inside them. I am experimenting with mediocrity. And nothing terrible has happened.
No one died when I relaxed my standards. The world did not collapse when I stopped trying to be twice as good.
Living in a more liberal state, I am putting down the belief that black women must overperform to deserve security. Because the truth is, I hardly see anyone trying as hard as I am. And still, I am undervalued and underpaid.
So I ask myself, honestly: What am I trying so hard for?
Reconsidering work as vocation (unfinished)
This is the hardest one. I am not there yet.
The career we were told to work toward does not exist without burnout, and I do not want that. I want work that sustains both myself and others. I know this sounds very Millennial. I also know it’s not naïve to want a life that doesn’t require erasure.
So for now, I am researching. Imagining. Testing. Sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what comes next.
No Resolution, Just Reorientation
I don’t think disintegration is destruction. But I also don’t think it’s alignment, at least not yet.
Right now, it feels more like a loosening. A decision to stop mistaking endurance for virtue and proximity for responsibility. It’s noticing how often I have mistaken over-identification for care, hyper-engagement for awareness, and self-erasure for commitment.
Disintegrating has meant asking where I am leaking energy into systems that cannot, and will not, return it. It has meant questioning why so much of modern life requires me to be constantly available, constantly informed, constantly reacting. And whether that constant engagement has actually made me wiser, freer, or more humane.
I don’t trust the systems I participate in. That doesn’t make me exceptional. It makes me honest. And honesty demands a different kind of participation, one that is more selective, more bounded, more suspicious of urgency.
What I am practicing now isn’t withdrawal from society, but distance from its most extractive demands. I am experimenting with being less legible. Less responsive. Less performative. Less convinced that my worth is proven through exhaustion, output, or proximity to power.
This doesn’t come with clarity. It comes with trade-offs. With uncertainty. With the discomfort of not knowing what replaces the things I am slowly stepping away from.
I don’t yet know what a sustainable vocation looks like for me.
I don’t know how much disengagement is protective and how much is avoidance.
I don’t know how to live inside a collapsing economy without internalizing its panic.
What I do know is that over-identifying has already cost me my health once. And I am paying closer attention now.
So this year, I am not making resolutions. I am making room for contradiction, for rest that doesn’t justify itself, for identities that don’t need to be explained or defended. I am letting go of the belief that my life needs to make sense to everyone watching.
Disintegration, for now, is unfinished.
And maybe that’s the point.
May our loosening be our listening and returning to self.
—With love,
Kelli
You’ll figure it out! More time at Hideaway may be needed!
I understand deeply what you are sharing here. Type A here as well hehe..Thank you for sharing. Last year took me through a very similar journey and on the other side I found that detachment really is the way to go in every thing that we do.
Performing through existence trying to prove our worth is ingrained in us black women and it is such a heavy burden to carry. I realized that while this is ingrained in us, a lot of it also is self inflicted.
Last year I allowed myself to say things like “ I’m tired, I want to rest”, “I don’t want to do this”, “I need help here” etc.. and to my surprise as you said the world did not end. I felt my surroundings bend more to what I wanted than ever before.
The strong black woman archetype is something that I put down last year, it comes with so much anger, resentment, struggle, and lack of playfulness..please I am a damsel in distress, and life has been so much lighter and less serious.
I wish you the best this year and I wish for you to simply be in this world. That alone is priceless, and no amount of “doing” will ever add to or take away from that truth.