returning from the hero's journey

fitting your new self into a life designed by your past self

quick prelude

The main crux of this essay is this: I’m glad that I answered the call for my hero’s journey, but I am even more glad that I was able to do so and maintain the relationships I had before I left for the journey. I don’t think a good measure of how profoundly you have transformed is how radically different your external life looks afterwards: new people, new relationships, new city, new life. I think the mark of a successful hero’s journey is to feel earnestly transformed, and to feel like you don’t need to abandon the life you had before to maintain that transformation. The mark of a successful return from the journey is to feel like you can be your new self in a place you departed from as your past self. At least, this is what has felt most successful about my journey, to me. Hopefully you get a better sense for why by the end of this essay :)

by Serge Ivanoff (25 December 1893 – 8 February 1983)

My birthday is coming up soon, and I’ve been thinking about what this year will be about. That question left me reflecting on what last year was about, and the year before that. I came to the conclusion that this past cycle around the sun has been about returning home from my hero’s journey (and the one before that was about embarking on my hero’s journey—more on that in a future essay).

Nearly two years ago, I made a pretty radical change that launched me into what I would describe as my hero’s journey. I flipped the context of my life upside down (on purpose), to answer a mysterious but deeply powerful call I felt to go out and explore what felt resonant.

Then, about 10 months ago, I returned from that journey and came back home—to the city that housed me for my entire life. This place brought me up, raised me, formed me into a human with a sense of self, a personality, and a deep foundation of community, safety and love that I knew I could always depend on. I am incredibly grateful for everything I grew up with; I always felt extremely held here. But I also felt that there was more out there for me to discover. What did I need to discover? I couldn’t say; but I heard a call to go out into the world to find out, and I knew myself well enough to know that I would regret not answering that call.

So I did. I left what felt like the safe, deeply rooted home I had tethered myself to for most of my life and dove into my great adventure—an ambiguous journey I embarked on without knowing the destination I was heading towards. I surrendered the need to understand every step of the journey and allowed myself to be guided by my own intuitive sense of where I was meant to go and what I sensed was important. But I never really knew why I felt those things or what I expected to find there. I simply learned to get more deeply in touch with myself, and became increasingly loyal to my inner signals. I learned to let my sense of inner knowing guide me. And it ultimately did guide me towards what felt like the treasure I was meant to find on my journey.

I will talk more about the journey itself and what I found on it in a future essay, but for now, I will focus on what it was like to return home from the journey, to a place that has remained the same, while my inner world has transformed. I was scared: I didn’t know how to grapple with coming home to a place that suddenly felt so unfamiliar because of all of the ways I had changed while it had not. I didn’t want to lose what I had found on my journey, but I also didn’t want to abandon what I left to go on it initially.

the friction of the return

This is the struggle of returning home from the journey: not only do you need to negotiate the existence of your new self into an environment designed for your past self, but you also need to pollinate the place you came from with what you discovered on the journey. Such is the duty of the hero!

That duty can be a lot to bear—it puts pressure on the individual to both conform and individuate simultaneously. It poses this challenge of being your (current) self in an environment that knows you so deeply as your past self. And the thing is: those at home might not be trying to bring out that past version of you. They are not trying to suppress the new self, or tell you that your treasure is worthless, or that they want you to be the way you used to be. They just don’t know the new you yet! And the only way to make your newer self known to them is to re-introduce yourself as you currently are.

re-introducing yourself

The ultimate challenge of growth is integration. There is always a temptation when you go out on your hero’s journey, to just stay out there, unwilling to return home. To keep collecting treasure. Because that is the exciting part on the individual level: leaving home, following what feels right, discovering your path, acquiring your treasure. But an endless adventure is not the point of the journey. The point of the journey is to evolve and then seed your revelations back in your home. The point is to integrate, to land the journey, to make yourself legible to the world once more, and to teach them what you learned while you were away.

abandoning home is not the point of the journey

In some spiritual communities, I have noticed a pattern of glorifying this idea that becoming an ultra-evolved creature is defined by the complete abandonment of your past self. Tangibly, this translates to weakened (or non-existent) relationships with family, old friends, and the communities one has come from. To me though, this is not the point of the journey, nor does it indicate that you have successfully transformed. The point of transformation is not to leave behind where you came from with reckless abandon for those who love and care about you. That might be the easier path (because it is the lower friction path), but it is not necessarily the better one.

I understand why people do it: because it can be hard to accommodate old notions and projections of who you were. But this is part of the journey! As the hero, you get to stand up to those notions and reframe who you are. You get to teach those around you about who you have become. And this last phase—the landing, the integration, the return—cannot be avoided. Because if you refuse to return home, if you refuse to integrate, then your life just gets heavier. You end up with all of this treasure, and nowhere to put it, no one to share it with. No home to receive you warmly with. No nest to come back to. No one to reflect on the transformation you have had with. No one to see how far you have come, by knowing where you started.

That is a dangerous game: the never-ending journey, untethered from home and from the (necessary!) friction of integration that requires you to grapple with what you left behind, who you have become and what you want to hang onto. Hint: not everything you pick up on the journey needs to stick with you, and returning home helps you see what to dispose of and what to retain.

the return teaches you who you are now

The return is about taking a pause and beginning to understand the new version of yourself you are now. It is about integrating the treasure into your life so that you can adequately share it with others. The return has plenty of friction that stems from trying to fit back into an environment designed for a differently-shaped you. But that friction can be a gift; it can show you where new parts of you have grown and where old ones have dissolved. The friction helps you discover your new self, it helps you see your boundaries, it helps you re-acquaint yourself with your environment in a way that is reflective of who you are now.

honouring the pause

Life is not about always feeding this desire to seek more, more, more of what you don’t have. It is also about learning to be where you are, to want what you already have, and to slow down to enjoy the moment you are in, instead of always planning for the next one. This is the fundamental lesson of the return: to take a pause and integrate what you’ve learned before reaching for more. The return is about realizing that there will always be something sparkly about the unknown, but there is also a richness and dimension to what you already have that you can only tap into by coming back to it. As I wrote in find novelty through commitment, the deeper you sink into something, the more novel it becomes. And when you return home from a journey filled with wonder, novelty, and treasure in all of the most explicit ways, it does require some adjusting to return to the kind of novelty that you get from sinking in instead of seeking more.

old friends vs. new friends

A helpful real-world example of this is friendships. When I went away on my journey, I made some new friends. I enjoyed that they got to know my current self without the context of the past versions of myself that felt so sticky at home. I enjoyed being a blank canvas. I was also discovering that version of myself for the first time, and being seen for it felt really, really good.

But, of course, the shadow of these relationships is the flip-side of what makes them great. Namely: new friends just don’t really know you yet. Even if you “get” each other instantly, they haven’t seen you through hard moments. They haven’t supported you when it was time to show up (because they haven’t had the opportunity to!) and you just don’t have the history that lets you be in each other’s presence with a shared knowing that feels so organic, natural, and ultimately: timeless.

One of my newer friends astutely remarked that I have a lot of childhood friends. I realized he was right: the majority of the people I spend frequent quality time with are friends that I’ve known for 10+ years, and in many cases, friends who have known me before I was fully conscious; we have grown up together. I am quite proud of this. I have worked hard to stay close to my childhood friends, not just in the ‘knowing the events of each other’s lives’ sense (though this is a worthwhile aim!), but also in the sense that: I want to let them continue to know me and who I was becoming as I transformed, even as I shed versions of myself they had come to know so well. Because I love them. And they love me. And allowing those relationships to wither just because I found it too frictional to reintroduce myself in my evolved state felt unfair. Why not show up as you are and let the people in your life love you in that state? A great challenge with the return from the journey is that you assume people aren’t going to approve of or accept this new version of you—so, you hide.

At least, this is what I did at first. I didn’t know this new version of myself well enough to integrate it properly. I didn’t know how to re-enter my life because I didn’t yet know who I had become on the journey, I was still sorting out what had changed. So, I hid. I didn’t let myself be seen by those who loved me, because I didn’t know how to explain myself to them. I understand why I did this: I felt raw—I was just coming out of my cocoon, my wings were still wet, I didn’t know how to fly yet. I didn’t feel safe being seen. But I wish I had realized sooner that I could show up as I was, and everyone who loved me would still love me even as I was confused, freshly transformed and still getting my footing. I wish I realized that no one is as absorbed in our journeys of inner-transformation as we are, and that sometimes laughing with old friends about nothing in particular is one of the most healing balms in the world.

letting yourself be seen as you are

I wish I realized that so much of the return—of integrating the journey—is just being willing to be seen in whatever stage of the process you are in and inviting others to meet you there, instead of assuming they won’t understand and hiding because of that. I wish I realized that the love I share with those closest to me was never conditional on some version of myself I had been or was becoming, and that the people in my life just wanted to be a part of my life in whatever way I would let them in. And of course, as I did let them back in, and as I let myself be more known to them and everyone else around me, the treasures I had picked up along the journey naturally found their way into my relationships, conversations, and existence at home.

integration is mostly about *allowing*

The integration wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. It mostly just required me to surrender, to accept being (at least temporarily) misunderstood as the price for being seen. And realizing that, the more I opened myself up to where I was, the more at home I felt, and the better job I did sharing the treasures I had found on my journey.

It is a funny realization to see that the main thing blocking me from being understood was my own unwillingness to be seen—first by myself and then by others. But upon realizing this, it becomes instantly possible to open ourselves up with a willingness to be seen, felt and loved for who we were, are and are becoming.

That has been the whole lesson of the return for me: just come home and let yourself be loved. The rest will take care of itself. You are allowed to be confused, but you don’t need to hide your confusion. You can invite those who love you in and let them see you as you are, even as you are transforming. You are allowed to show up and admit you don’t know all of the answers to their questions yet. You don’t need to become anyone in particular to be received by them. You are already loved as you are. The journey is over—for now. You are safe. You are home! The rest will unfold as it is meant to. So, for now: just take a deep breath, relax and let yourself be where you are.

A prologue to this essay—answering the call—will be published soon.

---

Some related essays you might enjoy: becoming yourself is a process of reduction, on being selective, compatibility and connection, same wavelength, growing pains, letting myself be seen. You can also find my daily thoughts on Twitter.

If you’re interested in my 1-1 coaching designed to help individuals embark on their own process of inner-transformation, you can sign up to learn more here.