No person arrives at something real without first being stripped of everything they thought they were. And what is left after the stripping is not nothing. It is the first honest thing they have ever been. You do not arrive at that by choice. You arrive at it by surviving the thing you thought would finish you. The desert does not give you a new identity. It just burns away every false one until there is nothing left to hide behind. That is not the end. It is the beginning.