Editor’s Note: I started writing this piece on my one-year anniversary of living in India. I remember on my flight to Mumbai in September 2022, I was full of questions. I knew I was taking a step that would forever change the brush strokes on the canvas of my life, but I couldn’t have foreseen what that painting would come to look like (though, if you know me, you can probably guess I definitely tried).
With the amount of change I’ve had over the past year, I’ve welcomed any method of processing it all — breathwork, sketching, reading as many actor memoirs as possible. It’s been a lot to take in. As a result, I’ve been trying to retroactively fit my life over the past 12 months into the structure of the Hero’s Journey in hopes of understanding what this year has meant.
For those who may not be familiar, the Hero’s Journey is a framework developed by writer Joseph Campbell. It birthed the concept of the monomyth, which is the idea that we’re all living some version of the same story. At a basic level, the Hero’s Journey goes something like this:
There's a person who’s living a normal life. He or she is introduced to an opportunity that will take them away from their normal life in exchange for an adventure. On this adventure, they will experience some high highs and many low lows, all of which will test their resolve. Through it all, if the hero prevails, they’ll return to their original society — reborn — better off than they were before.
This sounded like my life, more or less.
So I read The Hero with A Thousand Faces, annotating the pages like I was in high school again. As I was reading, I saw myself in the heroes from the epics we studied in AP English like The Iliad and The Odyssey.
It sounds self-aggrandizing, I know. But this framework gave way to the idea of the monomyth for a reason. If you think about it, you can probably relate to the basic elements of the framework too — departure, initiation, return.
Think: going away to summer camp as a kid, leaving your hometown to go to college, starting a new job, visiting a foreign country for the first time, etc.
It’s the basic plot line of having an adventure and being better off for it. For a while, my life in India and change in career path were mapping quite well against each of these stages.
Departure was leaving for India in September 2022. Initiation would then be all of the challenges that came with quitting a job, starting a new career, moving in with a partner for the first time, all while navigating life in a foreign country. Then Return could be going back to the US once I’d completed a year of this adventure.
The Hero’s Journey offered me the perfect game plan. And besides, who was I to question the blueprint that Buddha, Rama, and Jesus all used? Life tracked perfectly against the framework. Until, of course, it didn’t.
What was surprising to me, and what I want to share today, is that it wasn’t until my path diverged from the roadmap of the Hero’s Journey that I came to learn what I was seeking all along.
Context
In mythology and folklore, heroes' journeys are told within a single book. It gave me the illusion that I could do something similar for my year.
By likening my adventure to the adventures of Achilles and Hercules, Gilgamesh and Lord Shiva, I thought it would be so convenient to go through the cycle of the Hero’s Journey in a 12-month period.
But I’ve come to realize that was incredibly naive of me. Not only have I been unable to complete all the steps of the Hero’s Journey in a 12-month period, but also the whole endeavor didn’t even start 12 months ago. It started long before that.
Here’s what it really looked like.
Departure
The framework begins with a call to adventure, which Campbell says “signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.” My call was essentially this nagging feeling that I should figure out how I could craft a more meaningful life for myself. Maybe I should quit my job, I thought! PC-folk will call it a sabbatical, but if your mind has ever been tickled by a naughty little thought like this, you know it’s actually just called an existential crisis.
Even though the call to adventure can be rather enticing, oftentimes there is a refusal of the call because the hero can’t wrap his mind around what everyone will think of him for leaving the path he was on — parents, friends, mentors. In his book, Campbell describes this as “an impotence to put off the infantile ego, with its sphere of emotional relationships and ideals. One is bound in by the walls of childhood.”
I refused the call for a while, thinking a life away from Corporate America was too great a risk and one I couldn’t possibly navigate. As the child of immigrants, I wasn’t prepared for it either. Departing from “the plan”, which entailed maximizing stability, was obviously not a part of “the plan”. Even the idea of deviating from such a path made me feel incredibly guilty.
But then I had supernatural aid — something that felt like cosmic intervention. Campbell states that supernatural aid “represents…the benign, protecting power of destiny”.
For me, this came in two forms. The first was my then-boyfriend/now fiancé (oh yeah guys, I got engaged this summer!!) Amrit, who has always taken his dreams seriously and encouraged me to do the same. He helped me throw some ideas at the wall to take a stab at answering the “what if”. What if I did follow my dreams? What would life look like? How might I spend my time? What might I actually care about?
Shortly thereafter came the mystery of a global pandemic, a time when it felt like the world slowed down just enough to feel the gravity of time itself. It let me explore the seeds of my dreams. One of these seeds was related to writing.
I’d always wanted to be a writer and had written all my life, but never had discipline around it. I just wrote whenever I felt like it, breeding some works of genius, sure, but also some works of absolute shit. With the aid of the pandemic, I spent more time writing and tried to do it more consistently.
This is what allowed me to get to the crossing of the first threshold, which you can think of as taking the first step. For me, that first threshold was not only investing more time and money into writing, but also sharing that writing with the world — something I’d never done before — and working past my fear of judgment. As Campbell confirms at this stage, “the usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored.”
It’s the reason that many people don’t ever cross this first gate into the realm of adventure. And while I didn’t know what a more adventurous life meant, I did know that I didn’t want to be a ‘usual person’ with a ‘usual life’. That's when I started this newsletter.
At the time, I told anyone who asked that I was publishing my writing as a way to reconnect with people I was no longer seeing in person due to social distancing. Now, I know I was also doing it as a way to reconnect with the artist in me. To reconnect with the dreams I had. My first attempt at testing out a new path.
I lived in this space for a while. Once I built up my writing consistency, I went further down the path of exploring what it might mean to be a writer. I was accepted to a writing fellowship, developed a writers’ collective with a few pals from said fellowship, all the while continuing to publish my work regularly.
After a while, I started to explore new styles of writing: poetry, short stories, and later screenwriting. The further I went down these paths, the more I recognized that writing was just a single bud blooming on the rose bush that represented the greatest love of my life: storytelling.
With this realization, I tried to make more and more of my day job (yes, I was still working my traditional nine-to-five) about crafting narratives. I tried to squeeze it into pitches and led trainings for how sales should be rooted in telling a story. But it just wasn’t equating to the level of fulfillment I was looking for.
I was starting to feel that it was time to double down on the path of adventure, which brought me to the final step in Departure: the belly of the whale. In mythology, the belly of the whale is a “popular motif [that] gives emphasis to the lesson that that passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation.” Meaning, in order to really step into who you want to be, you must let go of who you are.
It was time to make moves.
Initiation
The second step in the Hero’s Journey is Initiation. It’s all about going through challenges that test the hero and make him stronger in some way. It starts with the road of trials, which is “the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past.” I knew that in order to do this, I could no longer work a traditional job, and I could no longer stay in Chicago. When you grow up and live in the same place for so long, your identity becomes inextricably tied to that place.
At least mine is.
Shiv in Chicago lives a life I absolutely adore. She’s surrounded by the love and familiarity of the friends she’s had since she was a kid and a massive extended family. But the adventures on the road of trials are meant to help you observe the duality of self.
I knew that in order to explore different parts of myself, I would need to leave a place of inherent comfort. I just didn’t know where yet.
Then, in February 2022 I took a month-long trip to Mumbai to visit Amrit, who had moved to the city six months prior. I had visited India before as an adult, but I hadn’t been to Mumbai since I was a kid. Things felt new and familiar all at once. The trip felt spiritual in a way that’s tough to put a finger on. It’s like the stars were aligning in the fashion of the meeting with the goddess.
In this part of the framework, the goddess signifies “the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the soul’s assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile in a world of organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known again.” And Goddess Mumbai, bursting with high-energy people chasing all kinds of dreams, was giving me signs of a similar promise. A place to rediscover passion. A place where I might find and love a new version of myself as much as I loved Chicago Shiv.
Soon after this trip, I decided I would in fact quit my job and move to Mumbai. I would spend one year on sabbatical, exploring these interests I’d had since forever. A year of play. A year of wonder for wonder’s sake. It was going to be marvelous.
Cut to: Shivani weeps weekly in a moldy, post-monsoon Mumbai apartment.
I had made this epic move and was meant to be living my dreams! Why did everything feel so…pointless? Looking back now, I know that this was an inevitable adjustment period and very much a part of the road of trials. But classic Shiv had romanticized what an international move should look like. This was my equivalent of the woman as the temptress, where the “crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.”
I was frustrated that things weren’t moving faster and felt like my days were unproductive. In fact, I didn’t know what a productive day in this new life should even look like. Had I made a mistake?
It wasn’t until three months into Mumbai life that I experienced a glimpse of atonement with the father. Atonement “requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself.”
My version of this was when I was performing on stage for the first time as a part of my acting program’s Capstone Showcase. I was performing the monologue I’d prepared, when all of a sudden, the compounding frustrations, concerns, and self-doubt I felt in the months prior washed away. I heard the audience reacting throughout my five-minute performance with laughs, gasps, ‘mmm’s, and ‘ahh’s. I was making people feel.
It was in this moment that I had an epiphany about the meaning of my new work: the art is always more important than the artist.
With that, I had this overwhelming feeling that even though I didn’t know the road to get where I wanted to go, I was exactly where I was meant to be. Up until this point, I was so wrapped up in immaturely categorizing my experiences as good or bad. But at this stage, the hero experiences “the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and…peace in the understanding of the revelation of being.”
Atoning myself of ego, I continued to move forward on my new path. Making art was the ultimate task.
I started my next round of acting classes and added a filmmaking class at the same studio. I was at the studio more than any other student, teacher, or the owner himself, scheming to get involved in any project that allowed me to do so.
I started assistant directing plays, doing production work on short scenes for other actors, and helped on set for a music video. I auditioned for every role I could and was ecstatic to be cast as the understudy for Anna’s character in Patrick Marber’s Closer. I learned how impeccable writing empowers the actor, wrote my own scripts, had a one-act play produced, and even shot my first ever short film (releasing in 2024)!
Slowly but surely, I was starting to step into what I thought was apotheosis, a realization that “the hero himself is that which he had come to find.” A realization that this life of adventure I sought was within me; as a part of me, and not separate from me.
In a six-month period of complete bliss, I was working 12+ hour days regularly. It was challenging, no doubt, but I was constantly creating something that felt magnificent, surrounded by wonderful people doing the same. I thought that the thing I had come to do in India — find a way to live a more fulfilling life — was accomplished. I knew this path was for me!
I thought I had it all figured out and had learned the ultimate boon. This final step of the Departure stage is when the hero understands that “all things are in process, rising and returning. Plants come to blossom, but only to return to the root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquility. Seeking tranquility is like moving toward destiny. To move toward destiny is like eternity. To know eternity is enlightenment.” I thought, I found the work I want to do forever. And if eternity is enlightenment, I’ve made it!!
In the Hero’s Journey, enlightenment sets the hero up for the final portion of the framework: The Return. But my return, or at least my mindset around it, was premature. I thought I knew more than I really did.
Return
At the end of June of this year, I went back to Chicago for the summer. It was supposed to be the final chapter of this story. I was expecting the summer to be a period of rest — a time to relax from the trials of adventure and reconnect with my loved ones back home. After all, Campbell’s framework made it sound like The Return was the ultimate win. The hero is meant to return to his original society better off than when he left it as a product of the adventure he’d just been on.
I wish I could say this summer was all fun and games, that I gave myself time and space to recover from the busy six-month period I described above. And while I had all the time and resources to do just that, I wasn't able to.
I was caught in an endless cycle of feeling like I wasn’t doing enough and getting anxious about that, but then being too paralyzed by my anxiety to really do anything about it, which of course just perpetuated the original pit in my stomach. This kind of circular reference error is the most counterproductive because I was not creating anything, but I also was not giving myself the mental space to relax. To be present with my friends and family. It was strange and made no sense.
I was aware it was a problem but had no idea how to fix it.
I tried to communicate this to the people closest to me. But all I was able to manage was calling it a "funk". I didn’t want to go so far as to call it a depressive episode and freak them out. Instead, I just tried to put on a cheerful face as much as possible. Why complain and talk about this thing that I couldn’t exactly explain or even discern, right?
So I continued poring over Campbell’s book, studying each of the stepping stones he described in a desperate attempt to understand why I didn’t feel how I was supposed to feel. I thought I would feel victorious and accomplished when I went home, but instead, I just felt defeated and lost.
It wasn't until I came across the story of Rip van Winkle that I really understood my place along the journey.
It’s a folktale of a Dutch-American man who goes up the mountain one day and meets other Dutch people. He starts drinking with them, gets drunk, and falls asleep. He wakes up 20 years later to a town, people, and life he does not recognize.
When Rip van Winkle returned from his dreams, he made the mistake of thinking that he was returning to the same society as the same person as before he left. That’s what I thought when I made my return in June. I thought I knew what I was returning to, and I didn't factor in how that would be impacted by who I was returning as.
Campbell draws the parallel between the Hero’s Journey to our dream states often. He refers to the dichotomy of our existence as time spent awake vs. time spent dreaming, the human vs. the divine, the dark-world vs. the light-world, the conscious vs. the subconscious, the 2D vs. the 3D, the finite vs. the infinite, the known vs. the unknown, etc.
And just like we see in epic tales, in our dreams we have powers, super-human abilities, and sometimes even transcendence. This is why the return can be so difficult. Our dreams make it feel like our conscious state is entirely separate from our unconscious state.
They create the belief that “the two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other — different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into the darkness; there accomplishes his adventure…and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless — and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol — the two kingdoms are actually one.”
Should I have returned as the new me? Probably not, because that's still a very fluid concept.
Should I have returned as the old me? Also no, she doesn't really exist anymore. We killed her off in the belly of the whale, remember?
Caught somewhere in the middle of these two versions of myself, my sense of detachment this summer came from a similar place as van Winkle's. I was returning with the mindset that I was a freshly minted coin, but now realize that I’m actually just two sides of the same coin. We all are.
I returned to a place and people so familiar, yet so distant. Of course my relationships with the place and people I've known my whole life feel like they’ve changed, because my relationship with myself has changed.
In a lot of ways, I know I'm on the right path. Getting closer and closer to fulfilling my potential. But at the same time, I feel further from all that I've known. And like I said, I loved my life before I started on this path. But a point that's made extremely clear by Campbell is the idea that in order to become something or someone new, the old version must die.
When I go home for these small breaks, I feel like the old version of me is being resurrected by the sheer time that I spent inhabiting that version of myself. It's this insane tension between who I was and who I'm becoming.
What I'm learning is that these things are actually one. And while I can intellectually grasp that, I'm not in a place where I can really internalize it emotionally.
I thought I was ready for The Return. Maybe because it's been a year and that felt like a nice whole, round figure. Maybe because I desperately wanted to have something to show for my time away to the society that raised me. Either way, it's clear to me that I'm still very much in the Initiation phase of the journey, seeing that I can’t fully comprehend that the new me and the old me are still just a singular me. And until I can really grasp that, I “return, like Rip, with nothing to show for the experience but [my] whiskers."
I don't know how long the road ahead is, but I suppose that’s the whole point.
The point is to not understand; to not be satisfied with any particular form we take on. The point is to let ourselves be ever-changing, ever-evolving. It’s the only way we continue being the hero, because “the hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.”
Even though I wanted nothing more than to liken my experience to the great heroes in Campbell’s study of mythology, I’ve learned something bigger than the Hero’s Journey as a framework for this past year.
In epic tales, we get a full picture in a few hundred pages: beginning, middle, and end. But in reality — in our realities — the tale is much longer. It can not be limited to a year or even several years. In our individual lives we will experience countless journeys, each one teaching us something new about ourselves and the world we live in. One day, all of the journeys we’ve been on and tales we’ll tell will add up to a single story. That is the Hero's Journey: life itself, in its entirety.
The paint on the canvas of our lives never really dries.
In service to the monomyth,
Shiv
If this post resonated and you’d like to chat, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and now YouTube.
Love this! I have mixed feelings about Joseph Campbell as a human but I love the lessons you've taken from his work. This quote really stuck with me: "The point is to not understand; to not be satisfied with any particular form we take on. The point is to let ourselves be ever-changing, ever-evolving. It’s the only way we continue being the hero, because “the hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.”
Also reading Pema Chondron's When Things Fall Apart and a lot of what she says in the book resonate with what you're talking about: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/when-things-fall-apart-heart-advice-for-difficult-times-by-pema-chdrn/246560/item/42169773/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pmax_high_vol_frontlist_under_%2410&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=&gclid=CjwKCAjw9-6oBhBaEiwAHv1QvNxm_zpGcv5lxmOTdgWpnfOGRldhhA12RwxSKVjFNaVHPbdrytyKmRoCKPsQAvD_BwE#isbn=1611803438&idiq=42169773
wooo glad to see your writing again