EGO CONSTRUCT: CAGED
A few years ago, I decided to conduct an experiment on my own skin.
Guided by personal experience, I wanted to see what would happen if a person consciously removed almost every external marker of identity — style, aesthetics, possessions, social visibility, and all the recognizable elements through which other people usually read and define them.
As a fashion designer, I had developed a highly recognizable personal style. Initially, I did not create it as a concept for the market. I wore it myself, and only later began designing clothing for others based on that same visual language.
My style began taking shape in the late 1990s, during high school, under the strong influence of metal bands and the alternative scene of that time. It became so recognizable that a group of my friends showed up outside the Hotel Dubrovnik on the night of my graduation just to see what I was going to wear at the party.
Of course, I never showed up.
I had an online date with Pablo from Mexico, whom I had met in a Marilyn Manson Java chat room.
That probably says enough about me.
I mean, I had already spent four years seeing the same people every day. Pablo was from Mexico. Obviously, he was more interesting.
I used to shave my eyebrows. I wore platform boots, custom made by prominent shoe maestro Cujzek, with who I got into contact over Aunty Slava, who have taught me how to walk like a boss by carrying book on my head. I applied the palest liquid foundation — the kind normally used to lighten other shades — directly onto my face to achieve an almost unnatural complexion. At the time, Shiseido and Bourjois, had unbeatable shades for that pale, gothic-geisha look.
Leather. Flowy sheers and tight laces. Chains and straps. Uncompromising and honest all black. Hand painting leather coats I got from vinted shops, and decorating the seamline with metal caps taken from lighters.
Over time, my external expression changed and became increasingly pronounced, but even more interesting than the style itself was the reaction it provoked.
Depending on what was socially acceptable or trendy at the time, people’s reactions changed.
At one point, they were fascinated.
At another, they crossed themselves.
And eventually, everything began turning into categories.
Intrusive, trendy, social categories.
If you wear flowy clothing, you are probably a yogini. If you are a yogini, you must be a vegetarian. If you are vegetarian you must be into anything vaguely New Age, then you are probably a hardened feminist. If you are a feminist, then you must automatically be anti-traditional, of course then you likely want to dominate men – not only men, the whole world. Not the world, she wants whole universe. How dare she?
And around it goes.
At some point, you stop being a person and become a chain of assumptions.
Then comes another layer.
She’s exclusive.
She’s unapproachable.
Watch how you talk around her.
Throw in some surreal phrase — maybe you’ll connect.
After a while, even having a normal human interaction became exhausting because you constantly had to move through an entire construction that other people had built around you.
And sometimes, that construction became almost absurd.
I remember one particular occasion involving a friend who was deeply fascinated by Crowley. I was sitting quietly, apparently lost in thought, when he later turned to my friend and commented on how fascinating it was to watch me — wondering what I could possibly be thinking about.
He imagined me somewhere deep within the mysterious spheres of the human psyche, metaphysics, or perhaps some obscure esoteric dimension.
Meanwhile, I was actually contemplating on whether I should fry a steak or make spaghetti instead.
That, perhaps, was one of the examples of projection.
His mystification had nothing to do with what was actually happening inside my mind.
It was entirely built around the idea he had constructed of me.
And honestly, if it hadn’t been funny, it probably would have started getting on my nerves.
One day, I was watching a YouTube channel about minimalism and an idea occurred to me:
What if I simply got rid of everything?
What if I completely normalized myself?
What if I became visually neutral? Approachable. Unremarkable.
What if I closed my social media channels so that people would have no idea who I was, what I did, or what I was involved in?
One particular experience finally tipped the scale.
Someone I was supposed to go on a date with suddenly cooled off the moment he heard that I worked independently.
I also remembered someone who had once asked me:
“So, what are you going to do after university?”
I told him that I was going to dedicate myself to design.
He looked at me sideways, shook his head, and muttered:
“Ah. So you’re a career woman.”
Branding. Categorization. Boxes.
BRANDING AS IDENTITY
There is, however, another side to branding.
Not the conscious act of creating, expressing yourself, or giving form to your work.
I am talking about the constant need to brand oneself in order to become socially legible.
To make sure that everyone knows who you are.
What you do.
Where you belong.
What you represent.
How successful you are supposed to appear.
Because sometimes branding is not an expression of certainty.
Sometimes, it is an attempt to compensate for its absence.
If you constantly need to announce who you are, perhaps somewhere underneath that performance there is a fear that, without the announcement, no one would see you at all.
If every interaction has to establish your status, your importance, your achievements, your position, or your identity, then the question becomes:
Who are you when none of those things are present?
That was, in many ways, the question behind my own experiment.
I wanted to remove the branding.
Not because I rejected identity, expression, ambition, or creation — but because I wanted to know what would remain if none of those things were visible.
And perhaps that is where the difference lies.
A person who is anchored within themselves can use identity without becoming dependent on it.
They can build a brand without needing the brand to constantly confirm that they exist.
But when identity becomes a constant performance, when every interaction becomes an opportunity to establish status, importance, belonging, or superiority, then the brand is no longer simply an expression.
It has become life support for the ego.
And perhaps that is why the absence of branding can be so uncomfortable to certain people.
When there is nothing to compare, nothing to display, nothing to gain, and no obvious hierarchy to establish, they are suddenly left without the usual coordinates through which they understand themselves in relation to others.
And that is where the zero point begins.
THE EXPERIMENT
That was when my eight-year social and sociological experiment truly began.
I wanted to see how far human projections could go when people simply had no information with which to place you somewhere.
When they didn’t know what you were.
What you did.
How much you earned.
What your politics were.
What scene you belonged to.
What you ate.
Who you listened to.
What you believed in.
Or, quite simply, which box they were supposed to put you in.
I got rid of most of my possessions.
Books. Clothes. Furniture. Objects.
Sleeping on a tatami. Washing in a cold water.
Letting the ice in. Burning my own fire.
I consciously reduced my life to almost a simple minimum.
Minimalism was not an aesthetic trend, nor was it an attempt to create a perfect beige interior.
It was an experiment in stripping things away, and to see what would be my limits.
From kind of diet to the way I consumed my days.
From my wardrobe to my cosmetics.
I owned several nearly identical pairs of trousers, T-shirts, and caps. I wore minimal makeup. I began making my own cosmetics — face and hand creams, simple skincare products, and some makeup. I stopped dyeing my hair and wore it in a simple long braid down my back.
There was no longer any need to reconstruct an identity every day.
And then something happened that I hadn’t expected.
I became my bare self.
Or perhaps, more accurately — I finally had enough space to breathe.
Through my relationships and interactions with people, I began to observe their reactions more clearly.
Their need to fill in the blanks.
To assume.
To project.
When you don’t give people enough material from which to construct an image of you, they begin constructing it themselves.
And that is where things become interesting.
Stripping away parts of my own ego brought me an immense sense of freedom, but it also stripped bare the constructions of others.
People were not simply reacting to me — they were reacting to what they could not identify.
To the empty space where they could not immediately place a label.
To a person without enough visible markers.
Without a pre-packaged identity.
Without a clearly defined cage.
THE ZERO POINT
People who are genuinely anchored within themselves generally do not need to measure you by the way you look, what you wear, what you do for a living, or how socially “valuable” you appear to be.
What matters to them is something much simpler.
The kind of relationship you have with them.
Whether you are fair.
Whether you are honest.
Whether there is mutual respect.
Whether there is an ethical foundation to the relationship.
And whether you can laugh to simple things with them.
They do not need to know your market value, how many people follow you, who you associate with, how successful you are, or what image you are building around yourself.
Their sense of self does not depend on feeling bigger or smaller in relation to you.
But there are other kinds of relationships.
There are people who simply do not know what to do with a person from whom they cannot gain anything.
No status.
No advantage.
No access.
No social validation.
Nothing to show off to others.
If they cannot use you to fuel their own ego trip, if they cannot turn you into a social accessory, a reference point, a stepping stone, or someone through whom they can appear more important — you suddenly become invisible.
And that is where the zero point begins.
The moment they cannot extract anything from you, you remain before them without the function they had assigned to you.
And then you become a mirror.
Not necessarily because you tell them something about themselves.
But because your presence — stripped of status games and mutual measuring — gives their ego nothing to hold on to.
In metaphysical terms, perhaps this is the simplest form of a mirror:
What you refuse to become for another person may eventually force them to encounter themselves.
UNEXPECTED CONNECTIONS
What surprised me most, however, was what I found on the other side of that experiment.
Once I stopped presenting myself through recognizable aesthetics, scenes, and social markers, I began finding common ground with the most unexpected people.
People I would never have assumed I had anything in common with.
We could sit down and have genuine conversations about spirituality, metaphysics, esoteric traditions, existence, consciousness, and things that rarely make it into ordinary social conversation.
And sometimes those conversations went much deeper than anything I had experienced with people surrounded by visual glamour, cultivated identities, intellectual posturing, or the polished aesthetics of belonging to a particular scene.
The people I expected to have nothing in common with sometimes turned out to be the ones with whom I could speak most openly.
And the people whose exterior seemed to communicate everything sometimes had very little to say once the performance was removed.
That was another lesson of the zero point.
Depth does not necessarily announce itself.
It does not always dress itself correctly.
It does not always use the right vocabulary, belong to the right scene, read the right books, or carry the right aesthetic signals.
Sometimes the person sitting quietly across from you, whom you would never have categorized as “your kind of person,” turns out to be capable of meeting you somewhere much deeper than the people who seem, on the surface, to speak your language.
Shared aesthetics do not necessarily mean shared consciousness.
Shared vocabulary does not necessarily mean shared depth.
Sometimes you have to remove the entire costume before you discover who you can actually talk to.
And metaphysically speaking, this also made sense to me.
When you reach a neutral point — when you are no longer constantly projecting an identity outward or trying to attract specific kinds of people through recognizable signals — something changes in the field of experience.
Intense synchronicities begin to occur.
Unexpected people appear.
Unexpected conversations happen.
Connections form across completely unrelated backgrounds, interests, and social worlds.
It is almost as if, once you stop trying to define the shape of the encounter, life has more room to arrange it for you.
I began to see the zero point not as emptiness, but as a state of openness — a place where projection becomes quieter and coincidence becomes strangely precise.
PUTTING THE ARMOUR BACK ON
What had begun as a temporary experiment eventually became something much deeper.
It became a necessary shedding.
Because that was when I understood something , from assumption to confirmation:
External expression is not necessarily a place where a person hides.
Sometimes, it is quite the opposite.
It can be armour.
It can be a tool.
It can be a language.
It can be an extension of the inner world.
But it becomes a cage when other people begin to believe that it is the entirety of the person.
And perhaps even more so when the person themselves begins to believe that without that armour, they no longer exist.
After years spent in that neutral zone, I eventually began putting my armour back on.
I began returning to my full external expression.
I began creating again openly.
Designing.
Building.
Showing who I was and what I did.
And then, some faces began to change.
Almost as if something they had not expected had suddenly appeared before them.
A ghost.
The person they had placed into an empty category was no longer empty.
No longer neutral.
No longer available for unrestricted projection.
Because now there was something concrete.
Expression.
Work.
Identity.
Mark.
Strength.
Autonomy.
And with that, the entire mechanism for them began activating itself again.
Comparison.
Ego trips.
Competition.
Attempts to redefine the other person.
Attempts to place them somewhere again.
To find a label.
To make their presence manageable through a familiar pattern.
Because for some people, the problem is not necessarily who you are.
The problem is what they feel when confronted with something they cannot control, use, diminish, or easily explain.
That is when their internal image begins to collapse.
Faces and their public character metaphorically melt.
As if, behind the social mask, an abyss briefly opens — a space where there are no ready-made roles, no status games, no pre-established hierarchy.
Only reaction.
Only the ego desperately trying to find its place again.
Perhaps this is why so many people remain trapped inside a parasitic cycle of existence: they constantly need someone else through whom they can confirm their own value.
Someone who must be beneath them.
Someone who must be above them.
Someone they need to approach because there is something to gain.
Someone they need to dismiss because there is nothing to gain.
But rarely is there space left for a simple relationship between two human beings.
Without function.
Without friction.
Without usefulness.
Without the trading of identities.
THE ARMOUR WAS NEVER THE PRISON
My “armour” was never my weapon.
It was never evidence behind which I hid.
Nor was it an attempt to impress anyone, intimidate anyone, or convince anyone of my worth.
It was a shell.
An external expression within where I felt entirely myself.
I could take it off.
I could put it back on.
And perhaps that was the most important thing I learned.
If you can take off your armour without losing yourself, then the armour was never your prison.
It was a tool.
A language.
An extension.
Not an identity.
And that is why I can put my armour back on without needing to prove anything through it.
Because I know that I am not what I wear.
also know that I am not my name. But that is the subject for itself.
I also know that I do not have to hide in order to prove that I am somehow “above” external expression.
I can be simple.
Unnoticed.
I can be completely stripped back.
Or I can put my armour back on.
And in every form, I remain the same.
I wish that for you too.
The experiment began as an attempt to shed an identity.
It ended with the realization that identity itself had never been my issue.
The problem was the cage that people build around it.
And perhaps that is the final paradox:
I removed the armour only to discover that I was not the one trapped by it.
Meet you at the Zero ground.
Tanja, X