USE YOUR EXPERIENCE TO TURN TRAUMA INTO STORY
Deeply personal and mind-altering, your hero journey memoir is the perfect vehicle to help others. Do not be afraid to dive deeply into your story beneath the story.
HOW DO I KNOW I AM ON A HERO JOURNEY?
Let me reassure you. You are living your own personal hero journey, right here, right now! What does it look like?
You are going about, living your life. Then everything changes and you are challenged. You experience something hard or bad. There is no other option available: you MUST face this task. You will need help along the way, be it research, friends, or mentors. You must become tough, and it may take a while, but you succeed. Then you return to “normal life”, but you are different, changed, and stronger.
Sounds familiar?
SO WHY SHOULD I USE MY EXPERIENCE AND WRITE ABOUT IT?
The answer is simple. Because it matters.
Tim Mathis provides us with five reasons to pen down our memoirs.
- Your hero journey externalizes the problem. Thus, it differentiates between who you are, and what happened, which makes it easier to write about.
- It forces you to identify coping skills, both your own and people who can help you. And that is the crux of your story – how do you make it through, and who or what helps you?
- This brings us to the third point: it is not a “forever” situation. You develop or source your coping skills so that a change or transformation is possible.
- The next problem that arises is that you must “go back to your normal life. What does it look like to get back to normal? “Where does this problem fit in your life now? How are you changed, and how have you grown?”
- Finally, Mathis says, “the Hero’s Journey is perhaps the most common structure that humans use – normally unintentionally – to tell stories. Having your own experience in this form gives you a way to share it with other people in a way that they’ll understand. Sharing with other people in a way that they’ll understand is, itself, crucial for healing.”
WHO SAYS I’M A HERO?
The whole point of us being heroes is growth, development and learning how to fight, to overcome a problem. Writing is particularly useful for those of us learning to cope with difficult or traumatic experiences.
David Farland gives a workable explanation of what it constitutes to be a hero. “A heroic character is typically likeable. That means that he is often in pain—perhaps both physically and emotionally scarred. He also cares deeply about others, enough that he tries to become a protector.
But the hero, during his journey, usually needs to grow into the role of hero. He doesn’t come fully formed. He may want to help others, even be willing to die for them, but he doesn’t know how.”
THE HERO JOURNEY IN MEMOIR WRITING
One of the main factors of mental distress is that we get stuck. We just cannot get past the thing that happened to us: trauma, the death of someone, shame, or public humiliation. You feel your life is ruined.
Precisely because of this getting stuck in unhealthy patterns, it is so important to take a step back, and turn the problem into a story. A memoir. A biography.
“You’ve just proven that it is just one part of who you are, and that it’s a part of your experience that you’ve managed (maybe well, maybe not) and that you will grow from and move through in some way in the future. You’ve identified your own strengths and your own agency in the face of difficult circumstances, and you’ve identified the people who are important to you. You still have crap to deal with, but you’ve leveled up. You’ve asserted a degree of control over your experience,” explains Mathis.
The secret and healing lie in the process of giving your journey words.
UNCOVER THE WAYS TO ACCESS YOUR HERO JOURNEY MEMORIES.
Rian Malan, acclaimed South African author, wrote that there is much violence in creation. It is like opening a door, but the door will only open once you have bashed your bloodied head against it, repeatedly.
It is daunting, I understand. But allow me as an author coach to help you uncover the ways in which one can access those buried memories, motives, and mistakes, without becoming bruised and bloodied.
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