Your lostness is a gift

A manifesto

Hello, friends,

Welcome to How to Go Home, a newsletter about what the hell to do with yourself after a mythic journey. About finding belonging after a period of change that shattered you, then gathered you up again as something altogether new.

I’m saying “welcome” even though we’re a few months into these letters, because I’m thrilled to say this little community is growing, with an especially big bump after my essay came out in LitHub last week: How to Go Home: On Resisting a Very English Hero’s Journey. So, welcome.

What can you expect to read here? Well: over many years of trying to find meaning and belonging, I’ve arrived at a few core beliefs. Here’s a manifesto, of sorts:

• Stories saved my life, and being saved by stories is a universal birthright. I got lost and broken so many times that I realized the point of life isn't to avoid getting lost and broken—it's to find and live into the bone-deep stories that help you survive when you do. This was the original function of stories: to keep people alive, in every sense.

• There’s nothing wrong with getting lost in life. In fact, throughout human history, almost all societies have recognized that getting truly lost for a while is not only inevitable but desirable, since it brings people into their own wisdom and, later, brings that wisdom back to the home fires. This is where initiation rites came from. You weren’t a full member of the adult community until you’d experienced true, ritualized lostness—a death and rebirth—in your adolescence.

• Because the modern West has lost those practices, it rewards those who play by the rules. Which means that if you happen to carry round with you a sneaky sense that there’s more to life than working and shopping and building an unblemished home, you’re likely to have a tough time. Your whole initiatory journey is likely to be much, much more difficult than it needs to be, because you’re swimming against the current.

• And yet, if you’re one of those people, you are so needed. The conventional lifestyle in the modern West (the nuclear family in a consumer capitalist, globalized economy) is unsustainable in just about every way. And human survival depends on people being willing to risk their social safety to step outside of this convention and seek new, as-yet unknown ways of living.

• In this context, the hardest part of a mythic journey isn’t the initiation, the “death” part of the cycle; it’s the return. It’s crossing the threshold back to a more grounded way of living, and finding a way to bring your wisdom with you, even if everyone thinks you’re off your head.

• It’s easy to fetishize the difficulty of this return and get stuck sulking that nobody recognizes the gold you’ve dug up out there in the dark woods. Easy and totally understandable but, ultimately, harmful. The real work, the real belonging, comes from sidestepping your (very valid) hunger to be seen, rolling your sleeves up, and starting to build a more vital, connected world.

• That’s why we need each other.

• And: that vital, connected world is already forming. As civilization breaks down, a new, old way is breaking through. A connective, polyphonic, radically feminine, ecological, intuitive way of making meaning and understanding ourselves as living beings. This is Very Good News. Because:

• The front line of humanity’s crises is in human souls, minds, and bodies.

These are the themes I’ll be writing about here.

And I hope that you’ll write back to me, too. I started writing these letters in large part because I felt desperately lonely. Because I’d been through a lot—addiction, recovery, divorce, work struggles and health struggles and a desperate quest for belonging that saw me live in 19 homes on three continents in the space of 11 years.

I started writing because I wanted to build community. So while I’m tremendously grateful to you all for reading, I want to hear from you, too. If you feel so inclined, please drop a comment and let me—and everyone else here—know about your mythic journey and your winding path home, wherever you happen to be on it.

Thank you, as ever, for reading.

Love,

x Ellie