 that most people, deep down inside them, feel lost. Lossness could just be dissatisfaction with your job, dissatisfaction with a relationship, dissatisfaction with your life. All the while feeling like you don't know how to get out of it. You don't know how to fix your mistakes, find the right path. You might feel like you don't know how to live. You don't know how to live life right. That lostness might go all the way down to the existential root. Feeling lost in the face of death, feeling that whatever you do will inevitably be meaningless. But knowing that, nonetheless, you have to do something. You can't do nothing, and you don't want to waste your life. So you feel lost, or at least I felt that way often. I spent a lot of my life in chaos. My 20s were a time of too much dope, not enough plans. I got married twice before I was 30. I'm 65, by the way. But then I didn't know what I was doing. I had two kids, Jackson and Zoe. But you know, when I first became a mom, I felt that the way to be a good mom was to be an interesting person and live an interesting life. But for me, interesting meant chaos. When Jackson was little, and we were living out in Sheridan, one day I came home and he came up to me and he was crying, and he was so worried because he had been thrown around the baseball and he by accident broke a window. And my reaction was, wasn't. What I did was I looked at him and said, come on, let's break some more. And we did. Window after window with rocks, sticks, a two by four. Crash, it was so wild, it was so fun. And at one point, just as we were about to heave a brick or something into one of the garage windows, I looked at him and he wasn't smiling. He wasn't enjoying himself. I saw terror, the terror of a world that didn't make sense. A world that didn't have rules. I saw that I was giving him what he needed most, a sense of order in the world. So I tried to start again. Move to San Antonio, two little six and 10. They got over the divorce pretty quickly, honestly. And they liked their new life there in San Antonio. And they liked their new step down, Britain. But I had a carrying around in me like some plague, this enormous heavy guilt and fear that because I had done them so much harm in the past, I was doomed to keep on hurting them. So I tried to really fix my life upright. I tried to build a kind of life, I saw in my parents. I saw the people around me. And what that meant was abandoning a lot of what I had loved about life in the first place, a sense of unpredictability, creativity. I was so worried about doing the wrong thing that I restricted myself to doing only those things that seemed right, had the new husband. I had the kid. But of course I wasn't happy. Of course I felt like I was living a checklist instead of a life. And so of course I cheated on him. Of course I left him. Of course I broke. The one thing I was trying so hard to make. A stable, loving home for my kids. I look at my kids now and even though they're doing okay, one just opened a restaurant, the other one's a medical school. I see the strain and mistrust they hold to me. It kills me that what should be a lifetime's accumulation of love and intimacy between a mother and her children is tinged with brokenness. They don't have a child at home that I still live in. They don't have a stepdad who knew them when they were 12. All that stuff that I want them to come back to in me, I broke it. I moved to Michigan with my partner, Renee. After all this really hit me like I'm gonna break it. I try to figure out how a person should live their life. How I could live my life without hurting the people around me and without hurting myself. Joseph Campbell dissects hundreds of myth narratives in search of what he calls the monomyth or universal story structure or the hero's journey. The structure is essentially this. The structure is essentially this. You need go, search, find, take, return, change. In other words, the circle of the hero's journey starts with a problem in the ordinary world that asks the hero to go to some dark, unknown place to gather some kind of power to change that ordinary world. The hero's journey is the journey of psychotherapy in a way, of plumbing something hard to reach inside you to find inner strength today, and that's what I did. I realized I was stuck in a cycle. Either live for myself and in my chaos or hurt the people around me or restrict myself. Build a life I thought I should live, but then chafe against those restrictions until I felt forced to destroy them. And what I realized was that my problem in my time of powerlessness was that I didn't know who I was. Is indicative of personhood. Trying to figure out who I am, the best way to do that would be to study my actions. And what's going to tell you the most about me are the things that really come from me, the things that I, in my full effect of personhood, really do. Seeing me accidentally knock over a chair might tell you that I'm clumsy, but it doesn't tell you very much about my inner life. It doesn't tell you about who I am. But seeing me do something I really choose to do tells you something about how I think, what drives me, what I think is important, who I think I am. Think of it this way. A character appears on the screen. What do we know about her? She hasn't done anything yet. Well, we know her approximate age. We can figure something out by the way she's dressed, where she is, the people around her, but what do we know about who she is? Nothing. Nothing that is until she takes action, until she does something. And in some way, by acting, indicates who she is. But you're watching that movie and that person just gets pushed around, never making their own decisions, always reacting, never doing anything they chose to do. And what if that person is you? What do you know about yourself? All you have are accidental, reactive acts. Drifting, unknown to myself. Living on accident, hurting the people around me, not knowing what I wanted. I tried something I learned from Joseph Campbell. I put myself on the hero's journey. I began at home in Michigan with my partner, Renee. We have been together for three years, long enough for the initial new excitement of our life together to have worn off, but I already felt myself chafing against the boundaries of the life. I didn't feel like I chose. It felt like something I had received. Renee had always talked about us having a home of our own and here we were in it. And it already wasn't that great. You. I was thinking about this when on TV of all faces, it hit me, a commercial, an image of someone who looks like me, someone who looks like the person I wanted to be, the person I should be, could be, happy, free. She was surrounded by family, but still very, very much herself. She was beautiful and she was on sale. Renee, and so I left. Go. I left my home and journeyed out into the wide world where I found the underworld, the mall. Like he has sported into large, well-lit parking lot, gaping at the hundreds of cars parked like so many husks of cicadas in molt. I went inside, there, inside this brightly lit, cavernous land. I found around me shelf upon shelf of unfulfilled desires. I found items from my path that I had never thought I would see again, beanie babies, cargo shorts, a record player, a DVD copy of The Searchers. The same perfume my mother wore. I looked around, around me were countless other lost and weary journeyers, dead-eyed, looking for that thing that would make them feel like themselves. At each store, a guardian stood, Cerberus of the GameStop, Banatos of the Sun-Glass Hut, Medusa of the Shepherd Image, Eurymimos, Devourer of Flesh of the Panda Express. I feared losing myself to these dark, unknown forces, but I screwed my courage to the sticking place knowing it was my very life at stake. I wandered for what seemed like a lifetime searching for the image I still saw burning into my mind's eye, the woman I should be, summer section of me. Deep violet one piece with a side cut out and a black stripe running down the strip. It was sexy, it was beautiful. I instantly imagined myself in it. I imagined all of us, me, Renee, Jackson, Zoe, a picnic on the beach, laughing, saltwater in our hair, Renee with that little bit of sunblock on her nose. Me, in that bathing suit, perfect. I took it to the changing room and tried it on like it was made for me. I lay across the changing bench, a smile pouring across my face as I thought I could spend the rest of my life in this changing room and it would be perfect. And a voice, the mall will be closing in 15 minutes. I had to escape, I had to go and I had to bring the suit with me. I ran out of the store, swim suit in hand until somebody grabbed me. Aren't we gonna pay for that? And my friends, my friends I pay the dear and dear price. I returned home, a changed woman, feeling like finally, finally I had gotten my life on track. Finally, finally I had wanted something and I had gotten it. Who was I? I was the kind of woman who wore the most elegance when we're on the shelf and I had nothing to hide. I hung the suit up in my closet but fully it seemed an insult. And for days on end, I would find contentment in my smallest moments, thinking of it, waiting there for me. Zoe and Jackson still wouldn't return my calls. I felt that same emptiness creep up inside me again. Couldn't do anything right. I didn't know how to live until I thought I could buy again and again and again. I could keep on imagining the person I wanted to be and buy the things to make me that person. And if I didn't get it right the first time, I could try again. I could try to get closer and closer to the person who was my real true self. And sometimes it wasn't a thing I bought. Sometimes it was a gym membership. Sometimes it was a drawing class or a trip to Greece. Sometimes it was a resolution that I'd volunteer in the suit kitchen or rescue an abused dog. If I wasn't living life right, just imagine what the right life would be and try to live that, right? But no matter what, I would always, always return to this same point. She knew as soon as she had started talking that it wasn't coming out like she planned. Sure, the words were right, or most of them at least, but something about the way they felt when they hit the air was action. She knew there was a version in her that was right and this wasn't it. And it was as if the longer she talked, the further and further she departed from the correct course as if she were a bullet shot at just a degree off its target so that the farther it traveled, the farther it got away from where it should have been going. She had tried internally to correct, to put herself back on the right course, but she also knew that there was nothing more deadly than self-conscious, self-correction in the middle of things, so she eventually, about half way through, just resigned herself with the word. Next time, next time, I mean not tomorrow. Now the next time she'd give this speech, she knew that this was her one shot with this audience, with this room, but next time, as in the next time she had the chance to do this exact speech, to this exact audience, at this exact room, at this exact time in some vague version of the afterlife or reincarnation or something, next time. She found these words oddly comforting in their vagueness in the way that they healthfully disqualified this time and now it's just rehearsal for the real deal. Next time, she'd get it right. Next time, she'd be there. The first time the thought had ever come to her, she was in 11th grade and she was on stage at the awards ceremony of a big science fair standing on stage next to Chris, who she had just the biggest crush on, even though she was pretty sure that he was already making out with that other girl, Stacey, who later went into film or something. But standing there, waiting for the winners to be called when she decided, if I hear my name, if I'm one of the winners, I'm gonna lean right over and kiss him. Full on the mouth. She resolved to do this. Thinking about it gave her strength in the anxious, taffy like time of waiting for the winners to be called and maybe now you can guess the rest. She heard her name. She had won fifth place and she turned to look at Chris and she thought. And again, the metaphysics of this next time were vague at best, but in that vagueness, lay their calming effect. The next time that she was here on stage, winning fifth place next to Chris Sidman, she would kiss him. And it would be her first kiss ever.