Sunday Journaling Prompt: Your Heroine's Journey 📔🖋️✨
If midlife and menopause truly are a heroine’s journey… where are you along the path?
If midlife and menopause truly are a heroine’s journey… where are you along the path?
Back in 1988, I took a course at Uni taught by this wonderful cowboy of a professor, Dr. Gary Lease on Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey. It rocked my world as it also intersected with every screenwriting class I would ever take…or later teach. Recently, some wonderful person put the entire PBS archive of Joseph Campbell talking with Bill Moyers about The Hero’s Journey here:
Kino Lorber has remastered them beautifully and it’s always amazing to have words straight from the source.
Where has the paradigm deviated? Where have you stalled? Or, gotten stuck or stymied? Where have you broken through—even in small shards?
For my own part, my entry into perimenopause coincided with a dual diagnosis of a severe seizure disorder at age 41. It was a forced “Call to Adventure” that I completely refused. I was in denial for months, pretending that nothing about my life needed to change when really… I was crossing a threshold into a whole new world—one rife with unexpected health challenges (med trials, psychedelic convulsive seizures, night sweats, anxiety, aphasia), unlikely allies (clinicians, alternative types), and unforeseen enemies (old habits). My moment in the abyss came when I went into the ER for an epileptic seizure and ultimately found myself under a psych eval. Seizures are not a mental illness, neither is perimenopause. I was definitely in the wrong place, but it took some explaining and measured self-conviction to resolve things. After twelve years, I’ve reached the road back home and feel like I am about to master both worlds… the ordinary, the special, the murky middle.
How do I know this? I can work again.
You may have found yourself on a similar journey—albeit with different story points and health details. Where are you in the process? What does it feel like? What has come before? What do you think might come next? What about it feels epic? What about it feels mundane, but still somehow oddly important?
Yours in Grandeur,
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I prefer this one. Brilliant!