Welcome to How to Go Home

What the hell is this, then?

Hi, friends,

If you’ve been reading my letters for a while, you might know that I moved home to England last year, after living abroad for 11 years.

When I bought a one-way ticket to Argentina back in 2010, I never dreamed I’d be gone so long, or that I’d return so changed. If I’d known that the next 11 years would take me through 19 homes plus a year on the road, through marriage, divorce, addiction, recovery, two continents, several career changes, and enough breakdowns and breakthroughs that, somewhere out in the Mojave Desert one snowy December, I finally met the blinking, breathing, unformed, unknown shape that turned out to be me . . . If I’d known all that, I’m not sure I’d have had the strength to go.

But back in 2010, I didn’t have the strength not to go, either.

That’s the thing about some journeys: you don’t seem to have a choice about them. Eve was always going to eat that apple. Odysseus was born to fight in Troy. And the virus came to drag you to the underworld, no matter where you hid.

When you’ve been on a journey like this—a journey willed by something bigger than you, which turns the world upside down and rewrites your DNA—what do you do when you finally find your way back to the familiar?

I’m still thinking about this, more than a year after my plane thudded down at Heathrow. I’m still working at coming home. In fact, I’ve realized that coming home might well be my life’s work. 

If I’d been paying more attention, the old stories could have prepared me for this. The tale doesn’t just end when the traveler pitches up at the village gates. It’s right there in the infamous hero’s journey structure (on which, much more later): after the separation and the initiation, there’s the return—the part where you try to bring what you’ve learned back over the threshold. Where you try to live differently, with the knowledge of yourself and the world that you gathered out there in the great beyond. It’s the least sexy part of any journey, and the most important. But how the hell do you do it? 

These letters will be my attempt to answer that question. How do we do this, all those of us who’ve been on a journey these past years? (And isn’t that all of us?) This will be an investigation; an emergent strategy. I don’t have any answers yet. 

Actually, that’s not true. There is one thing—just one—that I know for sure in all this. And that’s that this is crucial. It’s imperative that we learn how to go home after hard journeys, and how to welcome others, too.

If you’ve been through a long lostness, a sickness, a bereavement—anything that’s sent you to the underworld and back—you’ll know how painful it can be just to navigate other people’s responses to your situation. The fear, the pity, the outright avoidance of the subject, the sense of social aberration—it can be almost too much to bear. It can have you hiding away at home when what you need is community, is kinship. 

And this response does such an enormous disservice to everyone. Not just the soul journeyers but also the people who stayed home, whose lives haven’t taken the route through the tangled woods (yet).

Because these periods of wandering, of lostness, of facing mortality: they don’t diminish you. They forge you in fire. They make you invincible, enormous, more alive than you’d ever been. They show you extraordinary things. Bring you to glimpse the larger than human. 

Finding your way home after an experience like that warrants awe, curiosity, applause. A storytelling circle. A campfire. A goddamn parade. But as a society, we’ve forgotten how to offer that kind of welcome.

It wasn’t always this way. Long ago, before European cultures got severed from their indigenous customs and then exported that severance around the world, every community member would have had an experience of lostness, of deep humbling—and then a return. As adolescents, everyone would have been sent out into the wild to fend for themselves for a spell. And because everyone had experienced such a rite of passage, everyone would know how to talk about hardship and lostness.

And they’d know, too, about the wisdom, the insights, the belonging, the bone-deep joy that you can only find out there, in the dark—and that their own survival, back home, depended on such riches.

Because in a society that doesn’t honour people’s odysseys through the tangled woods, a fallacy starts to take hold: that survival means staying safe. That it’s about avoiding discomfort. That you survive by amassing resources and crushing anything that threatens you.

And that is a recipe for disaster. A recipe, in fact, for the very disaster we’re living right now: consumerism run riot; ecocide; extreme alienation from ourselves, each other, and the living world. 

So this is a newsletter about the mythic return, which means it’s also a newsletter about collective survival. Collective thriving.

Human survival, human thriving, are going to mean getting comfortable with difficulty and darkness, because there’s difficulty and darkness coming, and there’s been difficulty and darkness all along, and hiding from it is killing us. 

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: welcome to How to Go Home. This is a newsletter about the mythic return. I’ll be writing weekly. And of course, if you don’t want to be on this list anymore, please feel free to unsubscribe at any time.

Love,

Xx Ellie