The Anti-Hero’s Journey
There’s a book I love that reads like a movie. Its descriptions are cinematic. The story unfolds at the perfect pace – slowly but with an increasing urgency that always keeps me up late into the night, reading long after I should be closing my eyes. I’ve lost myself in those magical-epic-ethereal-romantic pages at least three times if not more, but in my latest reading over the last few weeks (days, really – it always pulls me in and I get through the book fairly quickly), I unearthed a whole new layer to the story that went past its fantastical premise and deep into the heart of something much more personal. Something that resonates with me in my own life – the hero’s journey. Or rather, an anti-hero’s journey.
This mini-epiphany started with a brief passage near the beginning of the story that describes a period of time when one of the characters feels slightly lost and spends much of his time wandering around outside of his home. He goes for long walks with no clear destination in mind but invariably tends to end up in the same place – an old oak tree that soothes and comforts him, with great big branches to climb that afford him sweeping views of the surrounding fields in his hometown.
For some unknown reason (or because of the obvious reason that writers simply have this power), these lines of text immediately called to mind my own aimless walks and drives around the small neighbourhood I grew up in. Destinations purposefully unknown on countless treks over 35 years with circuits that are as familiar as the beauty marks spotted across my arms or the lyrics to my favourite songs. I can still trace those tracks in my mind and I feel as close to them as I did when I was 7, 15, 21, and 34. But now it’s strange to think that I have removed myself from that world, from that familiar place that was home for so long. I know I could go back tomorrow and trace my most enjoyed routes without hesitation or uncertainty of the direction – but I wonder if, or more aptly when, that will fade.
Of course, there’s a lot of emotion that boils up in response to this. Sadness to leave behind that hometown in an effort to make way for a new one, sort of. Reverence at the astounding feat of having actually left that all too familiar place for somewhere completely foreign – or at least foreign in the minutia of daily life. Fear that one day I might actually forget. But above all, what stands out is a light and heart-filling joy for having had a place that I was so connected to, with spots I loved and serene moments wrapped up in comforting landscapes.
It’s a familiarity that is very much about my childhood. The one park with a tire swing that had a huge field that connected to the back of a tiny cemetery. The sand pits – some sort of mining site that for me were a wonder of pyramids made from sand with wild dunes and steep cliffs. My elementary school. Houses that friends lived in, now long abandoned and filled by new generations of families with children who will take over patrol of the winding streets I grew up on. Crescents and cul-de-sacs that I circled on my bike in daylight as a child and skulked around in twilight as a young adult. The manicured duck pond at the entrance to my neighbourhood with a fancy sign welcoming you in. The more secret duck pond found at the end of a shady street that you ONLY knew about if you really lived in the area.
I love these places. I do not miss them, not precisely. But I hold them tightly in my heart like a small child might hold to their favourite stuffed animal, or a toddler who clings to their mom and dad. Thinking of them brings me to a place of love and comfort and unexpected serenity. And maybe that’s something to hold to, to tap into in moments of peril, duress, and stress. A place to take my mind when it is not at ease, because it’s a place I left behind but a place that will never leave me.
It’s something we never hear about in the hero’s journey – the absence of familiarity and roots felt only at home. Those stories tell the tale of a great adventure, some quest bigger than any one person, but very much centred around one single person. We follow them as they leave their home, find friends and foes, face challenges and celebrate victories, and ultimately reach a pinnacle climactic moment of triumph (usually paired with some sort of great loss) that allows them to finally return back home.
It’s a trope in storytelling that I learned about in my days of studying English Literature back in university. That circular journey has recurred over and over across a long history of stories, and I never encountered any that broke with the template, at least not in my course curriculum. But what happens when there’s no returning home? When home becomes somewhere new – and let’s face it, there’s no mythical quest with a finite end to the story? The truth is there’s sometimes no great purpose in a journey. There’s certainly none here in my own story and I definitely don’t think of myself as a hero.
I suppose what resonates in that more classical journey is the sense of loss. Even though our heroes make it back home, they are forever changed by their experience. The loss varies from story to story – one’s innocence, a loved one, their faculties – but the common denominator is always there. Victory comes with a price. And that feeling is something that carries beyond the mechanics of a larger-than-life quest, well into the heart of any reader who has lost something at some point in their life.
I’m not about to pull up my old papers or the syllabus from that class (and in any case I’m fairly certain those were lost in the last great purge of things found in the basement of my childhood home) so I can’t quite recall the big theories my professor had about the hero’s journey. Perhaps it was simply a course designed to identify and look at the recurrent theme of leaving and returning home in literature. But I’m grasping for something more here – for some meaning to fan the flickering flame of thought that sparked from a character wandering around his hometown in my favourite book.
I keep coming back to that sense of loss. Only mine is the loss of going back. I’ll return to my hometown, of course. I hope to in the next few months, if I can. But that place I left is very, very unlikely to ever be home again. Nothing is permanent and you can always change your mind – but I don’t see myself going back. Friends I have who still live there are well on their way to raising their own families and that next generation of children who will wander the same routes I used to. They will attend my old schools, find the fun secret spots, and watch the town grow and evolve just as I did for 35 years, before I moved across the country. But those won’t be my children. (Will I even have children? Who knows. That’s a whole other thing.)
So here’s a question: Why didn’t anybody ever tell me about the absolute mind fuck that is spending your whole life in one place only to uproot to another? I wasn’t prepared for this – for these completely overwhelming philosophical musings about leaving behind history and familiarity and a generational footprint in the place I used to call home. I knew I would miss it and I felt deeply homesick when I first moved. But now, that feeling fades. I miss it, but less so in a way that consumes me and more like it being a piece in my heart that I carry with me always. Instead I’m left with these much bigger and open-ended feelings that I can’t quite define. (Mind fucked is truly the closest I can come to summarizing it.) I’ve lived through heartbreak and mourned the loss of people, but never of a place. It’s on a different frequency.
Further along in the beautiful and cinematic book that I love so much, our character finds himself grappling with the question of whether or not to leave home. As he engages in a long conversation with two central players in the story, one says to him:
You’re not destined or chosen, I wish I could tell you that you were if that would make it easier, but it’s not true. You’re in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that’s enough.”
*No spoilers! Or, spoilers. See below for the scoop on my all-time favourite book, and read it. I’ll love you forever.
With all my earlier thoughts circling around the hero’s journey as I began the book, this excerpt really stood out. Because it seems that the author is very clearly establishing that this story is in fact not a hero’s journey. Of course, I knew this all along – I know how the story ends – but these words from a cherished character in the story somehow resonated more strongly this time. What struck me was the simple idea that not all journeys are heroic in the classical sense. It’s not always about destiny or a special quest – in real life, it’s arguably never about that. In most cases we end up on a certain path because as the character says, we’re in the right place at the right time. There isn’t necessarily more to it, and there doesn’t have to be.
Sometimes we are faced with the prospect of going on a journey that won’t bring us back home. We choose to say yes knowing that we may live with the uncertainty of that choice, or unexpected surprising discoveries like mourning for place. And even if we never leave the place we’ve always called home, we can go on journeys that take us far from a life we once knew. Loss exists in many different ways. In all cases, life goes on. Time passes. The way life once looked, what was familiar, what we held close and dear – all of those things evolve or change or disappear. What matters is that we choose something. We’re there in that right place, in that right moment, and we care enough to try. To take that leap. To take the new job. To quit. To say yes. To start something new. To move. To move again. To cross a country.
And isn’t that heroic in its own way? Making choices that set us down one path or another – living with the uncertainty of whether that choice is the right one, but making it nonetheless? At least for me, a person who is endlessly indecisive, there’s always a measured and balanced weight of doubt in every choice I make. (I blame this on my self-diagnosed middle-child-syndrome-see-both-sides-gemini-twin-psyche mindset – a wide-lensed perspective that lets me see every possible angle which is crippling but also helpful… I’m learning to harness it.) I suspect that even those who do not live with this type of affliction must sometimes in some instances in their life wonder, “is this the right choice for me right now?”
Fuck yes. If you’re choosing something, you are a hero. Or an anti-hero, just like me.
*This quote, and boundless inspiration, come from The Night Circus, written by Erin Morgenstern.
This is an adventure. 
“The truth is there’s sometimes no great purpose in a journey“ this line struck me in the best way, I felt more free somehow after reading it. I also loved your ability to highlight the consistency of loss with all “adventurous victories”. Beautiful space carved out for the grief in following so many fictional hero’s, to push ourselves to be heroic, only to be left with so much more sadness than the books warn. In 2003, a year after I had moved from my home town in tiny Saddlebrooke to Los Angeles with a population of 14 million humans, I remember feeling completely taken out by an epic amount of despair, your words here describe with pristine accuracy what that reality had been for me, thank you, at the time I had no words. 🙏