Anoush Witsel
Aug 9, 2017 · 1 min read

My concept of the hero was sculpted mainly through Russian fairy tales where the protagonist usually suffered some great loss and then set out to regain it.

Whatever was lost was almost never retrieved in its original state and it was the process of retrieval that was almost always the point, being much more interesting to the imaginative soul than the object or person or gift at the end of the quest.

I think the problem with heroic journeys can be that the suffering endured in the service of the symbolic goal, whether that is others’ healing or your own, becomes the measuring stick with which you rate your own worth. An ingrained kind of martyrdom that invests you with a sacred gravitas.

How many heroic stories do we encounter that do not enshrine suffering?

To experience your own shadow and accept it for what it is whilst seeking what has been personally or culturally or globally lost, is the task. But can’t that process be kept simple?

A question I ask myself whilst battling ogres, demons and quicksands and the like is, can this discomfort, this pain, this shame, be brought to light in a way that will joyfully support and encourage those around me? It is a way I have found to reduce the urge to wallow, and keep the path unspooling before me.

Because it’s always easier to get stuck in Eeyore’s Sad & Boggy place, and we will always need the Jester.

xxx Anoush