The most difficult assignment I’ve ever been given in a class came during my sophomore year of college. At the time, I was trudging through Organic Chemistry and Human Body, two of the most notoriously challenging courses college has to offer. But the mind-numbing tasks of completing their rigorous homework problems and studying for their gargantuan exams paled in comparison to the time I was asked to write my life story as a “hero story” in my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class with Dr. Michael Wesch. The hardest assignment I’ve ever had to do was this one.
I thought it was so hard because, unlike any assignment I had ever been given, there were no right answers. I was the only person in the world who could do the assignment—no one else could do it for me. But in reality, it was hard because I was afraid to try. I was afraid to try because I hated the person I was supposed to be writing about. I was afraid I would discover that my hero wasn’t as smart, brave, or capable as he thought he was. I was afraid I would find out that my hero was a fraud and a failure. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was terrified that the story of my life would be a boring narrative about a deeply flawed, stupid, unhappy man. But because I had to, I wrote the story anyway, blindly jamming the events of my life into the themes of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. For days, I wrote and re-wrote my story, hating every minute of it. It was truly the hardest assignment I had ever been given. Finally, I finished in the early morning hours the night before it was due, slammed my laptop shut, and went to sleep.
The next morning, I read the story back to myself and finally understood why it was so hard. The fear that crippled my ability to write the story had been invisibly present throughout my entire life, and it now screamed out at me from every page. Without realizing it, I had written an entire story about a fear I never knew existed.
When I finished reading it I cried. Then I had one of the happiest days of my life. Writing that hero story would become a defining moment in my college experience and would go on to change the way I participated in the world around me.
My hero story was so helpful to me because Campbell’s framework and its categories naturally brought out themes in my life’s story that were otherwise difficult to write about. And stepping back and viewing my life biographically from a third-person perspective made these themes—core tensions and struggles in my life—easy to see and understand. I was at a miserable point in my life, and as it turned out, it was because my fears of inadequacy and failure were holding me back from following my “true bliss.” My most powerful enemy was my own self-doubt, and discovering this yielded a personal transformation within me that freed me from the constraints of fear and allowed me to go on new hero’s quests that I was too afraid to go on before.
The story of that transformation is a hero’s journey itself—I’ll tell it using Campbell’s hero’s journey framework.
Pre-adventure Quintessential Mundanity
I grew up with the fear that my socio-economic class would prevent me from living the life I wanted to live. From an early age, I was dually petrified of not being liked by other people and not having enough money to live as well as those around me. When the time came to apply to university, I did not have enough money to do anything but continue living with my parents and attend the local community college (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this fact made 18-year-old Garrett ashamed of himself). My solution to this problem was to score high on the ACT. I performed poorly on my first try. And the second, third, and fourth tries. But I persisted, studying hours a day for a year and finally, on the eighth try, earned a score high enough to grant me a scholarship for full tuition at Kansas State University. This, combined with some other scholarships I broke myself over, made it possible for me to afford to attend KSU, which was literally the peak of my aspirations at 18 years old. I had set my sights on a goal and transcended what I saw as the chains of my social class through what I believed was hard work. I had a bliss, which was more-or-less working in creative ways to solve problems by building organizational structures that helped people. But my entrance to college had nothing to do with my bliss; it was about achieving what was a narrow view of “success” that revolved around being good at the things I thought society valued: being a model student, popular amongst my peers, etc. It was not my bliss that would make me happy, I thought, but chasing these other things which could be attained through sacrifice and hard work. This was the beginning of a vicious cycle that would conspire to destroy me.
I arrived at K-State and, like a good college student, my horizons expanded and my aspirations skyrocketed. But the infinite height of the societal ladder of status and wealth became visible to me for the first time, and it crushed me. I wasn’t good enough after all. But since hard work helped me with my problems of inadequacy the last time, surely it would again help me acquire more things—in this case good grades, merits, and awards—that would enhance my worth as an individual. I quickly forgot about everything I truly cared about—from friends to personal passions—and, running from fears of failure and inadequacy, I relentlessly chased the security of academic “success.” I had devoted myself to the rat race at 18 years old, and it was clear to me that I would never be satisfied. I became outrageously unhappy and cynical for nearly two years, yet I did not know why. I continued grinding through my hard science classes, wrecking the curves, and feeling empty inside.
Call to Adventure, Trials
Relief came in the form of this class, where for the first time I was no longer exclusively focused on getting an “A.” The work we were doing in the class as students was too important to spend time groveling over scantron, multiple-choice exams—we had to go out “in the world” to complete “challenges” and find the answers for ourselves, and when we returned with our answers we would discover the common lessons that could be distilled from them.
Each challenge I completed for the class worked me out of my own metaphorical “river of doubt” and up my own “mountain of fear” that Dr. Wesch talked about in the introduction to this course. Along my way out of this river and up this mountain, I gained new perspectives, my eyes were opened to new possibilities, and my own thought models that were tempting me away from my bliss were made “fragile.”
Over the duration of the class’ challenges, I had explored and appreciated the differences between ordinary people and saw them not only as a representation of human potential, but as evidence that perhaps my own conception of human flourishing was incorrect or incomplete. This allowed me to ask bigger, tougher questions and try new things that placed me outside of my comfort zone. I saw how my own assumptions were embedded in my language, and that my terminology of “success”—metaphors like the “ladder of status” I described, or “chasing” good grades and merits—affected how I lived in the world. These metaphors made success, which was really a placeholder for happiness, to be something that could only be won through struggle, through physical exhaustion. I learned that we create our tools and then our tools create us, and came to understand that when it came to college, I had become the tool of my tools. I was shocked to discover that what I took as “reality” had been culturally constructed, and that my unseen, unexamined assumptions of what was right, true, or possible could therefore be deconstructed, changing the way I experienced the world. I was forced to examine those assumptions by encountering people different from me, shattering the illusion of being at “the center of the universe.” Finally, I explored hidden social, historical, and economic connections between the people of the world and was forced to grapple with the unnecessary suffering these forces engendered, putting me back in touch with my true bliss of helping other people.
These challenges gave me new tools, new ways of “seeing,” new lenses through which I could view the world. But my next challenge wasn’t to go out and use my new tools and perspectives to explore the world around me. This time, I was supposed to sit down and use what I had learned to look within and explore myself. What’s more, this self-exploration was mandated to be focused on “my bliss.” For the first time in school, my bliss mattered.
When I wrote out my hero’s journey and looked back on my life’s story, something incredible happened. Those intellectual tools I had acquired from the completion of my challenges, when used on myself, became like the keys to the shackles of thought that were chaining me to my misery. I wrote my story and turned the keys. The shackles fell off. I went from seeing myself as “is” to “might be;” I saw myself in a whole new light. Freed from my cognitive chains, I was able to reach the summit of my mountain of fear. For the first time in college, my self-doubt and uncertainty were completely beneath me. I was free.
But I was only able to have this realization through reflecting on my Mentors, who both gave me and helped me refine my bliss, and on my Temptations, which were keeping me away from my bliss.
Mentors, Temptations
I looked back on my life and asked myself what my true bliss was. I thought about all the instances where I was most inspired, the times when work turned into play, the times I was so excited I couldn’t sleep through the night. What was at the core of these experiences?
I looked as far back as my childhood, and discovered that my first Mentors were my parents, who gave me my first calls to action. They were both teachers in two of the poorest elementary schools in our city, and they were painfully aware of the unnecessary suffering of their students. Poverty, violence, racism, and other forces conspired to prevent their students from reaching their full potential. My parents instilled in me the categorical imperative to identify human suffering and address it unconditionally, and to find joy in doing that. A bliss was born.
I grew up being unafraid of how people viewed me and reveled in the bliss of the project of helping others. But growing up in our culture often involves the development of a “self” that is told it is not good enough in myriad ways. As I grew older, I became more self-conscious and insecure, and the lure of shallow, superficial attempts to run from these fears would tempt me away from my bliss.
By the time I arrived in college, I had forgotten about my bliss, or at least saw no place for it in the present moment. Upon reflection of this while writing my hero story, I realized that the people I looked up to most—professors, friends, public figures and writers I followed—all had the same bliss I had. And that those of them whom I knew had all used their time with me to impart valuable lessons and call me to action. Sometimes I would answer their call, but I was often hiding from it.
And it was here that I was able to isolate what truly made me happy—devoting myself to helping other people—and discover the forces of fear that were holding me back from pursuing that. If I was a hero, then I was abrogating myself of my responsibility to use my powers to help others. I immediately began recalling instances where I could have helped someone but was too worried about myself to truly care about their situation. Finally, after nearly two years of hating college, I realized that this discontent was coming from me not following my bliss.
The Boon
The ensuing months and years would see a profound change in the way I lived my life. I stopped living out of fear and began making decisions guided by my bliss.
I was planning on leaving K-State to transfer to an “Ivy League” school in New York because I wanted to be associated with more prestige. I wanted more powerful connections and relationships from a higher social class. But this wasn’t a decision grounded in pursuit of my bliss. I wasn’t going to be happy there. This school had to have nets installed under their bridges because so many students were flinging themselves to their death out of misery. I triumphantly threw my acceptance letter in the trash, a symbol of the death of my old self. Reborn with the power of my bliss, I embarked on new quests and adventures that I had previously never thought possible.
I packed up my car and moved to Boston for a summer to work for an organization called Partners in Health, a group of people I identified to be my mentors through their work and writing. I got to work and write with them and wallowed in the joy of being on a team of people who shared my bliss.
When I returned to K-State I saw it not as an adversary to be battled, with its exams and assignments that conspired to blemish my perfect record, but as an asset that I could harness in pursuit of my bliss.
I built a large team of advocates through my student organization, RESULTS, that would go on to travel all over the country to lobby members of Congress for legislative solutions to poverty. We quickly became successful, and our work was recently featured in the New York Times. My transformation from a cynical, scared person to a person empowered by their bliss is evident in the article.
I devoted more time and energy to a non-profit organization I managed with my friends, the Open World Cause, which was working on building classrooms and providing clean water and free food to children in Nepal and Kenya. I used my academic achievements at K-State to win thousands of dollars in research grants that would aid us in our work.
I spent more time out in the Manhattan community, organizing students to tackle the problem of food insecurity. I helped a friend’s organization, the Food Recovery Network, work on research projects, start new initiatives, and lobby for the establishment of a campus food pantry.
I was religiously practicing the art of eloquently listening for and accepting calls to action from as many mentors as I could find. And I had never been happier.
Eventually, I realized that there was no reason I couldn’t continue to go to school while travelling the world in pursuit of my bliss. So, I made arrangements with my professors, packed my books, laptop, and some clothes in a backpack, and left the United States to travel across Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi from January through August.
I had virtually no plans, but my bliss was all I needed. When you follow your bliss, doors open for you that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Before I knew it, I found myself in the U.S. Embassy in Zambia being offered an internship on a USAID project where I would be afforded the opportunity to work with health professionals to create systems that saved the lives of mothers and their babies. Bliss.
I’ve written stories and created videos about some of my other adventures here, none of which would have been possible had I not begun following my bliss after writing my hero story. I don’t know if any assignment or challenge I will ever have to complete will so significantly impact my life.
Best wishes for writing your own hero stories. If you’re struggling to find your bliss right now, I hope the hero story helps you like it helped me.