The Moment I Fell

Introducing the Masks of Inferiority

I’m a bit under the weather this week, so instead of a new video, I’m sharing an excerpt from my upcoming book, Midlife Initiation, in its original, written form…

I can identify the precise moment I flipped from Hero to Victim.

I was defending a peer against a group of coworkers, fully inhabiting righteous Hero protector energy: “How dare they blame my partner? We’ve done all the work. We’ve been telling you for six months but you wouldn’t listen.”

Notice the anger at not being appreciated. That’s the Hero mask at full volume.

And in that moment of extreme resentment, I flipped. I unconsciously adopted the story that we were victims, under siege. That lens started shaping everything.

In the architecture of the Six Paths, the three superior ego structures—Genius, God, and Hero—often get mistaken for strength, success, or even enlightenment. These are the paths of brilliance, inspiration, and relentless drive. They look good on the outside. They’re rewarded. They’re aspirational.

But they’re still distortions, which is why there’s an underlying sense of dissatisfaction with the potential for a full blown midlife crisis. And when one of these ego structures begins to destabilize, it’s rare that you fall into presence. Mostly you fall down, hard, into the masks of inferiority: Victim, Zombie, or Vampire.

When your strategies stop working, when your brilliance, charm, or strength can’t shield you from pain, what went up almost always comes down.

If you’re on the way down and don’t understand what the fall looks like, it will confuse you. It will shame you. It will trick you into thinking something’s gone terribly wrong. But nothing has. You’re just being invited into the next layer of healing in this Midlife Initiation.

Each of the masks of inferiority reveals the parts of you that you’ve disowned. The parts you’ve deemed weak, needy, lost.

To come back into wholeness, you must walk through these parts. Do not avoid them.

I was not seeing clearly in my Hero mask. I didn’t realize the projection I was caught in. And so, instead of dissolving that ego structure, I slid into the Victim mask.

The (literally) crazy thing is that I knew about the Six Masks and I knew I was inhabiting the Hero. That’s the strange paradox of the Six Masks: awareness doesn’t necessarily mean the pattern disappears right away. You can know you’re in a mask, and still not take it off. Due to habituated responses, we all struggle to change the patterns that drive our behavior.

But awareness does matter. It’s the beginning of the unraveling of your egoic costume.

When I finally named it, with the help of my coach, “I’m playing the Victim right now,” something inside me softened. It felt like truth. Like permission. I didn’t need to fix it immediately. I just needed to own it. To feel it. As a kind of sacred accountability.

That’s what helped me remove the mask. That’s what allowed me to begin again. Instead of jumping back to Genius or Hero, I started showing up honestly from where I was. Victim mode. And others showed up for me. One of my direct reports held space for me, showing such compassion and wisdom, walking me home to freedom.

Taking responsibility isn’t about blaming yourself. It’s about being present to what’s driving your behavior. That’s what moves you towards freedom: not pretending you’re not wearing a mask, but seeing through it, awake and open.

If this landed for you, if you’ve felt that slide from superiority to something darker, subscribe to continue the exploration of the masks of inferiority.