2.3. The Vanishing Point of Identity

There can come a moment when you are no longer the person you remember being. Not because you have grown, but because something essential in your personality has ruptured. The thread has snapped. You have finally lost the plot. Your name remains, but it no longer signifies anyone recognisable.

The ancient Greeks called this psyche — the soul. Today, we call it self-identity: a weave of memories, emotions, sensations, and stories. But what binds these fragments into a coherent sense of self? What prevents a creative person from becoming lost within the very identify they themselves manifested?

The Problem Is the Bind

In neuroscience, this is known as the binding problem. How does the brain generate a unified experience when it processes sight, sound, feeling, and memory in separate regions? How does a composer hear musical unity across an orchestral arrangement? How does a painter perceive emotional resonance through shape and colour combinations? And crucially, what happens when this ability unravels entirely and they can no longer perceive the “good” from the “bad”?

We have traced this descent through the previous essays—Collapse of the Muse and The War Between Nostalgia and Reinvention—where the creative self, overloaded and dopamine depleted, falters. Now, at the end of Part Two, we do not observe the breaking point itself, but it’s eerie silence: the hollow aftermath. A pause in which one must ask, If I am not that, then who am I now?

Creative Collapse

This question haunted the final years of American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, whose canvases aimed to distil transcendent emotion into pure form. But by the late 1960s, Rothko’s world was darkening. His health was in decline, his marriage deteriorated, and he became increasingly reclusive.

In 1970, Rothko died by suicide in his studio. Though his works endure, the man behind them had drifted beyond coherence. For an artist whose identity was forged through the articulation of the inexpressible, the silence that followed his final paintings was devastating. Research indicates that this level of collapse is not uncommon among artists and creatives in Western societies, revealing a recurring pattern that corresponds with identifiable psychological phenomena.

From a neuroscientific perspective, Rothko’s decline may reflect a collapse in the brain’s integrative systems. As Rothko’s outer life diminished, his internal architecture faltered. His late works, nearly black, spoke less of transcendence than of eclipse. Rothko’s story, like so many others like him, is not simply about the end of a career. It is about the final point of unravelling of rich creative self-identity. His death reminds us that for the creative, the erosion of identity is not a metaphor — it is a neurological and existential rupture.

Lost the Plot

This is not mere sadness. It is the failure of cognitive integration. The brain’s default mode network, responsible for self-reflection and narrative continuity, can falter under trauma or depressive illness (Raichle et al., 2001). Without its stabilising yet fragile framework, the self disintegrates.

As neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex argues, the self is a “controlled hallucination”—a perceptual construction built through prediction and sensation. When this construction flinches, identity becomes unstable. For the creatively-inclined, whose sense of self is often intimately tied to their authentic processes and performance of self expression, this instability can be catastrophic.

When the rituals of making art, the mirrors of audience responses, and the rhythms of artful routine disappear, the intended self-expression may find itself perceivably adrift. And so the studio falls silent. The brush lies still and dries. The purpose disappears. And the person vanishes.

Fragility

Creative identities are often forged in immersion, shaped through feedback and public projection. When that scaffolding collapses, so too can coherence. We have witnessed this collapse: Amy Winehouse, whose vocal brilliance masked inner disintegration; David Foster Wallace, whose incisive intellect could not overcome recursive despair. These were not failures of talent. They were failures of neural binding. When the very means by which meaning is made become inaccessible, the delicately constructed inner-self begins to slip. What unites these tragedies is not artistic shortcoming, but mental fracture.

In visual art, the vanishing point brings 3 dimensional perspective and depth. In the psyche, it provides unity of coherence. When misplaced and misaligned, everything distorts. Philosopher Thomas Metzinger reminds us: the self is a model, not a substance. When that model collapses, there is no essence to return to. There is only void. And yet the void is not empty. It is space. And space, as artists know, can be made meaningful. It is in this spacious void that we find opportunity. When the illusion of continuity and creative self-identify dissolves, the scaffolding behind it becomes visible. Our sense of self-identify is not found, but assembled—again and again. Neuroplasticity teaches us that patterns can be rewoven. That meaning, like art, is not discovered, but composed.

The Threshold of Return

And so we arrive at the edge of Part Three: Reinvention, Neuroplasticity, and the Evolution of Self. If this part was descent, what follows is ultimately ascension. We now turn to the possibilities of reintegration: to neuroplasticity as a medium of recovery, agency as the architecture of coherence, and intention as a tool of authorship.

What vanishes can be redrawn. What fractures can be rewoven. This is where the artist becomes the architect. This is the return from the vanishing point.