When I understand that the ego, the self, is nothing but a character in a story, and that all stories are made up by me, and that a self that emerges from a story goes to work proving the reality of the story in order to preserve its imaginary existence, then I can write new stories, with new selves, just for the fun of it and those stories will be just as “real” as any other story I’ve ever identified with.
The difference is that I can never again believe that they are objective reality and so, when I find that they need to be re-written or abandoned altogether, that I can re-write them or abandon them at will.