It's Time to Reimagine the Hero's Journey
Talk about the cultural roots of the care crisis...
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I am so so happy to have placed an essay on a personal obsession of mine: The Hero’s Journey.
This model of making meaning, gaining wisdom, and earning respect is both totally ubiquitous and totally care-blind and it drives me crazy.
My dream is to create a world in which people of all genders get to experience the traditional Hero’s Journey of setting of on one’s own in pursuit of truth AND (the forever ignored, but no less rich) Hero’s Journey of staying put at home and uncovering the life-shifting truths that only reveal themselves alongside our loved ones who depend on us.
Here is an excerpt of my oped, published Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. For the full thing, click here. (It seems to not be paywalled right now, so act fast! If you can’t access it, message me.)
My first meaningful brush with the Hero’s Journey took place in 11th-grade English class.
Our teacher read us Henry David Thoreau on leaving home and heading out on one’s own in order to find wisdom and transcendence, and to avoid being one of the mass of men leading “lives of quiet desperation.” Her deepened voice underscored the gravity of these words.
“Yes!” I remember thinking and went on to spend a good deal of my teens and 20s searching for the rough diamonds of truth and meaning according to “Walden’s” recipe.
Thoreau’s belief in the necessity of leaving one’s home and loved ones for what you might call a “good” or “interesting” life wasn’t unique. Narratives from the “Odyssey” and “Star Wars” to “Eat Pray Love” and “Wild” employ a similar framework, in which lead characters set out on their own in order to pursue a life story worth retelling.
Such narratives resonate; I’m a fan. But it took me becoming a mom to question the dominance of the Hero’s Journey, and the many inaccurate, patriarchal and pernicious assumptions it rests on. Independence doesn’t necessarily trump interdependence for self discovery; the public sphere doesn’t necessarily trump the domestic sphere as the place where big things happen.
Back in the 1940s literary scholar Joseph Campbell identified the Hero’s Journey in a variety of cultures and time periods. First, the hero must depart from familiar circumstances — “the world of common day,” as Campbell wrote. Next, they enter a special world — “a region of supernatural wonder” — where they are faced with a trial. There is a crisis, they struggle, and then “a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
When I first became a mom, I was frustrated by the assumption that my chance to go on a Hero’s Journey was over because big adventures don’t happen to those who have to stay at home and take care of the kids. But with time, a deeper grievance kicked in. I saw how Campbell’s formula stops us from seeing how parents like me experience life-altering, wisdom-inducing trials and triumphs all our own, at home and alongside the loved ones who depend on us.
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When we view it through this lens, raising a child is epic. It also helps free us from the lousy, simplistic binaries often applied to motherhood in particular — the still ubiquitous notion that being a mom is either a fairy tale or a nightmare, an experience of unbridled joy or merciless destruction.
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We all have something to gain in imagining a pathway to wisdom, respect and hero status that relies more on human connection than rugged individualism and brawn. In this age of increased loneliness and isolation, a cultural template that honors the difficulty and complexity of being in intimate relationships, and the potential rewards for sticking with them, might encourage people to invest more in long-term connections. Even when they are inconvenient. Even when doing so requires the slaying of a few dragons.
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View care as a Hero’s Journey and we just might treat those caring for a resolute toddler or teen or helping a parent with dementia with the same curiosity and respect we treat someone who just climbed Mt. Everest. Doing so wouldn’t lessen the demands of care, but it would give the wisdom gained from the experience the respect it deserves.
Perhaps eventually this shift in understanding would lead to more practical support for parents and caregivers. Even the greatest heroes sometimes get help from a sidekick, or an otherworldly intervention, to make it through alive.
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Before I go, I want to call attention to three recent Substack essays that reflected on my book and thinking about care in ways that were deeply meaningful to me. Subscribe to all of these writers!
This isn’t to say that motherhood leaves us entirely unchanged. In When You Care, which I also read last summer, Elissa Strauss describes going into parenthood determined not to lose herself, only to discover that caregiving did, in fact, change her. But not in the way she’d feared. “I had put so much energy into figuring out how not to lose myself to caregiving,” she writes, “that I completely ignored the possibility that I might, in fact, find some of myself there.”
Like Jones, Strauss argues that care rewires us - but as an expansion, not an erasure. What struck me most in her account was that she doesn’t treat this transformation as uniquely maternal, or even gendered. The rewiring she describes doesn’t come from biology, but from the act of caring itself: from presence, repetition, connection, and responsibility. That, more than any hormonal shift, aligns with how the attachment built between me and my son in the weeks and months after he was born. Our bond didn’t form simply because I was his mother. It formed through daily acts of care.
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Care was “just what I did.” So ordinary that I didn’t think about it as a practice of caregiving, really. It was entirely focused on our own situation and how to make everything work. Yet eventually I found that actively identifying as a MoM helped reduce cognitive dissonance and find meaning4 in the struggle. At first, I was doing the caregiving actions because I had to, but not feeling it as rewarding. It took away from some of my other identities to an uncomfortable extent. Leaning into the role helped me to get the meaning out of the experience in ways I don’t think I would have otherwise—much like Albert Camus’ interpretation of Sisyphus. It took my love for (all three) kids in conjunction with the support of an online community of MoMs and the community of support we had locally to be able to see myself as a MoM, with everything that meant, including how it shifted the way I framed the burdens. But now I can see all of this under the broad umbrella of a practice of care.
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“Yet while Strauss admits that the experience of care is far from a fairy tale, nor is it “a horror story” where caregivers must lose themselves to some “dark oppressive force.” Study after study has shown that, when well-supported, caregiving can significantly improve our health and well-being while deepening our sense of purpose. Leading with this nuance, Strauss envisions a new social contract in which the realities and exigencies of care are not just honored, but shared — a contract that she dreams will lead to expanded rights for parents and greater investments in care for the young, elderly, and disabled.”
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Yes! I totally agree about heroes' journeys. Fantastic piece!
And thanks for the shout out :)
Such a beautiful piece! I feel it in my bones, as the "new" mom of a 2 year old. Everyday is a Hero's Journey of its own, each new developmental phase the baby goes through is a new island I must learn to navigate, with new monsters to identify and new hidden oases.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing a very engaged father who clearly experienced fatherhood as a Hero's Journey of his own. He was describing to me the many insights he has gained already, and so many were beautiful gems to be shared widely.
Caregiving is a Hero's Journey.