The heroine's journey
On transmuting our pain to become who we really are & live an authentic life
Sometimes I look back on my life and it dawns on me how much of it has been fueled by the relentless effort to escape the disempowerment I felt as a child.
I was born in 1992 amidst the throes of change.
The world around me and its social, political, and economic structures were crumbling in post-Soviet Mongolia and families did what they could to survive.
The transition to a free market economy was an ostensibly promising one that quickly devolved into a system more akin to kleptocracy-turned-oligarchy than the liberal democratic utopia the U.S. heralded for the world with such triumph.
Families struggled. GDP collapsed by 20%. Inflation reached triple digits. Per capita income plummeted to $100. And unemployment soared.
It was in this time that my mom met my dad. She was 17 and he was 28.
The courtship that ensued is hardly anomalous: she was pretty, young, and from a family at the time experiencing economic hardship. He was older, enterprising, beginning to see some modest windfalls.
They got together and had me a year later.
What I recall of the next four years are scenes of mostly conflict and violence, but I couldn’t tell you if this was the default state in which we lived or if certain outbursts were so impactful that their recollections have seared into my memory and crowded out any scenes of domestic tranquility.
My memory of those years is faulty, lapsed, selective.
But my body carries with it the energetic imprint of those days, and the residual fear that lingers in me suggests that our days of quiet as a household were still fraught with tension, even between episodes of conflict necessitating occasional police intervention.
I’ve spent years healing these memories, undoing the dysfunctions I adopted to survive. I’ve tried to internalize or even feign stoicism, partly out of shame for feeling wounded by abuses that weren’t even inflicted on me directly. But the memories remain charged, the betrayal acute, the sense of my own impotence haunting.
In my family these incidents would today be considered trivial, banal even. A part of life, especially in those days. To give them weight at all amounts to shameful self-indulgence. To the American cultural perspective to which I’ve become almost fully assimilated, by contrast, these memories seem notable, heavy, serious—precursors to conditions that inevitably become pathologized with acronyms.
Perhaps this dissonance has deepened the disorientation, cleaving a chasm between what I feel and what I tell myself I should feel.
Or perhaps it’s less about the events themselves but the continuation of that sense of helplessness that followed us into what was meant to be our fresh start in America. The abuses we tried to flee didn’t disappear but followed us, mutating in form, shattering the fantasies of escape.
Like millions before us, my mom and I sought this promised land only to discover that our American Dream led us to project refuge onto a place that could function as safe harbor from the struggles of developing world poverty but not from the peculiar indignities of poverty as women immigrants in the so-called First World.
The specifics of these events are not my story to tell, but they can be summed up as the devastation of witnessing the person you love most undergo a string of abuses and hardships that can change your orientation to life. I loved my mother and watched her suffer and we experienced much instability together. And something in me resolved to become bulletproof as a result—nevermind that I didn’t know what this really meant or what it would cost.
So much of human ambition is propelled by conscious or (more often) unconscious desires to escape our formative wounding or prevent its repetition. The scar tissue forms and with it our protective mechanisms with unintended consequences.
And yet within the pain, one eventually finds, lies a dormant potential. As we start to probe beneath the inflammation, we uncover a redemptive invitation that gets to the heart of being human: we discover the opportunity to heal our original wounding so we may learn to harvest its lessons and share them as gifts.
We find that self-actualization is found in transmuting our grief into our calling.
Thus my own formative heartbreaks led first to my frantic youthful efforts to “escape” by obtaining first a full ride to Brown, my dream school, and then a job offer at Google, the least soul-crushing corporate environment I could envision for myself at the age of 22 when I had already formed a certain free-spirited willfulness and aversion to authority.
I didn’t yet know where I was going but I was certain that accumulating as much pedigree and prestige as possible would eventually help catapult me toward the safety I desperately craved so I could buffer the ones I loved from life itself. It would position me for a kind of “success” that would secure my rightful spot in the hierarchy of society so we would never again be trampled by misfortune.
But the soul had its own plans. It often does.
What started as my quest to save and be saved—myself, my mom, the little girl in me that had felt so powerless—was starting to show cracks in its singularity of focus. It began to cede, unwillingly, to a different longing in me, whispering from my depths, gaining urgency.
It became supplanted by the stirrings of my soul.
This clash of ego and soul didn’t happen overnight. It started as a restlessness that had no name, a feeling of being crushed by the emptiness of a life I had chosen for its status and not its substance. And despite my earnest attempts to ignore these stirrings, they began to crescendo into an unwavering insistence on radical authenticity, and none of my subsequent attempts over the next few years to negotiate a compromise would subdue its momentum.
I tried leaving Google, tried working at a startup in San Francisco, tried freelancing to blend the creative expression I hungered for with the certainty I couldn’t leave behind. I started one project after another, never fully trusting my inklings of inspiration but unwilling to revert to pure pragmatism.
But before I could fully surrender to this unrelenting impulse, I had to first come face to face with every remnant of unprocessed grief that had metastasized in me. These were, after all, the true obstacles to my courageous authenticity all along.
I was forced to stop running and start forgiving. I forgave each person who I had perceived as having wronged or violated us, exploiting our moments of vulnerability. I forgave life for being riddled with an injustice I had always struggled reconcile. I forgave through tears in my bedroom alone and on couches with friends who held me in my sobs and through prayers to God to dissolve my resentment for those who had long since passed without ever having received the grace of my compassion for all the things that had led them to their own pain.
I forgave and I purged and I released, and I freed myself from shackles I didn’t even know were binding me.
And when I had finally shed through enough layers of the pain that tethered me to ways of living and relating that did not ultimately serve me, I had to do the hardest work of all.
I had to begin to forgive myself.
I had to forgive myself for not rescuing us, and I had to hold the inner child in me who was still bereft that she could not. I had to release my desperate attachment to the idea that anyone could ever truly rescue another at all, let alone as a small child who is meant receive protection instead of providing it.
I had to then forgive myself for rewriting a new agreement for my life, one that broke the original “rescue” plan in favor of a plan that chose my soul’s integrity over the empty trappings of success.
I forgave and I forgave but the forgiveness continues, because the parts of us that are frantically trying to protect us from the core wounding that shaped us are reluctant to ever truly disappear.
But maybe they aren’t meant to.
Maybe they’re meant to be loved and not destroyed, soothed into stasis by the parts of us that now know better but gently set aside so the truth of who we really are beneath the pain can start to emerge and take the reins of our life.
Maybe we are here to be shaped by our heartbreak and not hijacked by it, our unique stories of tears and triumph synthesized into the best parts of us instead of perpetuating the dysfunction we may have once used to cope.
Each of us, I believe, are here to heal our original wounding and transmute it into the stuff of our truth, our gifts, and ultimately our calling.
We are our here to turn the darkness into the light so we can become beacons for those who also feel the stirrings of the soul which yearns to break out of the conditioning of fear and pain and into the truest expression of our brilliance.
I have spent the last several years quietly dedicated to the proposition of deconstructing this journey to share my reflections with all who find themselves at a similar crossroads. It’s a lonely journey but it need not be.
I believe that now more than ever we are being called to shed our old identities and step into our power, and my own journey has led me to discover that what I’d been seeking all along since childhood was not the “power” to be found in chasing status or prestige at the expense of my own flourishing. It was to be found in discovering and unleashing the truest expression of who I really am beneath all the wounding, pain, and limitations of who I thought I was.
This is what I call the heroine’s journey—the classic arc from darkness to light borrowed from the classic Joseph Campbell work—but made specific for women whose ultimate “resurrection” is often to be found in dying to a life of playing small and boldly reclaiming her power, her voice, and her agency.
This is the ultimate salvation and triumph: slaying our inner demons and becoming who we really are so we can share that heroic self with the world.
I’ll be sharing more of these reflections on Substack and on Instagram and I hope you will join me as I explore these ideas. Discovery awaits.