“The hero wanders. The hero suffers. The hero returns. You are that hero.”
The above-mentioned quote is a synecdoche to the last three years of my life.
I got around to finishing Turning Pro by the mighty Steven Pressfield.
The book is a masterpiece that compliments his previous no-bullshit concise masterpiece, The War of Art.
The Hero Wanders
I agree with Pressfield. We are all heroes. Hero's in our own story.
In December 2017, I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I had decided to quit studying BCOMM Business Management at the University of Pretoria (actually, my brain could not deal with another Pythagorean pile-o-poo equation to solve).
I was burnt out, confused, and…oddly happy? Not happy because I had quit. No. In fact, that thought increased my worries 10X. In fact, I’ve quit most of the activities I’ve given a shot in my life. Karate when I was a kid, golf when I was a teenager, and now varsity to name a few.
But in the process of all the shit, I found two things: CrossFit and a love for writing.
2018 came along, myself and a few friends went to Cape Town for holiday. I remember arriving and saying to myself, ‘Why the fuck are you not here?’ It just felt right (in hindsight, I was running away from problems I never knew existed…see The Hero Suffers below).
My mom is my hero. I phoned her after a 2-week alcoholic vacation in the Western Cape, and as always I was honest: ‘Mom, I need to be in Cape Town…’ My mom in a reluctant but I-will-do-anything-for-my-son attitude said, ‘Why don’t you look at studying at Vega?’
I browsed the prospectus and came across a degree called Copywriting. I thought to myself in a very American/South African accent — one similar to my uncle Kev (one of my heroes, too) — ‘Man, this sounds like something I could do.'
2018 was a year filled with festivals, booze, work, internships, learning, social media — it was a year of exploration. A year of re-exploration.
I ended 2018 similar to how it started: with the same good friends listening to psychedelic trance. And for New Year's I sipped on champaign on a rooftop bar SOHO in the middle of New York City with that same uncle Kev and my mom.
It was fucking rad.
The Hero Suffers
When you’re suffering, you don’t know you’re suffering.
2019 was the hardest year of my life. I suffered and I denied it — both to myself and to everyone around me. I found myself alone in my flat in Cape Town just wishing that I could be understood. To the untrained eye, everything seemed ok: the social media photos I posted on both my Instagram accounts were perfectly curated pieces of joy to illude to the idea of ‘I’ve got this, I’m ok.’
I didn’t have it. I was not ok.
Then, my gran passed. This was the first close family death I have experienced. My gran is one of my heroes. I had no idea the impact this would have on me. On top of that, I had a fallout with my father.
But, feeling optimistic, I concluded that going to AfrikaBurn with my friends would solve the issues permeating my subconscious. Didn’t you know that spending a week in the desert with little or no food and enough alcohol to feed Stellenbosch University was the answer to your deepest suffering?
At AfrikaBurn, I experienced a bad trip. Let me reframe that because I don’t think there are good or bad trips, just like I don’t think, as Henry Ford would say, ’There is anything bad or good but thinking makes it so’ — there are only challenging trips (in hindsight of course). Thinking in this case definitely made it so. The first night in the desert, while experiencing my ‘challenging trip,’ my entire life’s suffering boiled down to the internal conflict I had with my father.
After the Burn, I recovered well and saw the light of day.
Then…
Then on precisely the day, I was born, the 1st of August 2019, everything changed. I felt, what I thought was a pimple on my face. But It wasn’t. It was a giant cyst which a lovely lady in the hospital at Wilgeheuval made worse by thinking it was a pimple. She squeezed the sucker with all it’s puss and poison back into my face.
Exhibit A is the aftermath:
After a heavy course of antibiotics, I felt like the Earth's giant veiny erect penis had slapped me with all its might.
My identity was conflicted and I was scared and alone and truly I didn’t know how I was going to get through the year (pass my studies in one piece that is).
On top of all this, I was rushed to the ER a few times and had a CT scan done because I had unusual chest pain. We concluded it was, contrary to me thinking it was a heart attack — twice! — Costochondritis. Costochondritis is a pain that causes your ribs to contract which makes you believe you are having a heart attack every 10 or so minutes of the day. Google it. It’s a thing.
The Hero Returns
2020 felt like that viral video of a plane landing in Germany during a gale-force wind.
I could feel the runway beneath my feet.
If the runway is finishing varsity, then the wind must be COVID-19.
The struggle to finish this post has been real. When you write, sometimes you don’t know who exactly you’re writing for. But if I have learnt anything over the past few years — no matter what situation you find yourself in, you are writing, as Maria Popova would say, to please just one person: yourself.
I stumbled upon Stephen King’s book, On Writing, and after his own physical struggles (he got hit by a van and nearly died), he wrote about coming back to life again through writing:
"Little by little I found the beat again, and after that I found the joy again. I came back to my family with gratitude, and back to my work with relief – I came back to it the way folks come back to a summer cottage after a long winter, checking first to make sure nothing has been stolen or broken during the cold season. Nothing had been. It was still all there, still all whole. Once the pipes were thawed out and the electricity was turned back on, everything worked fine.” — Stephen King
Stephen King describes writing as telepathy.
Similar to Stephen King when he got hit by a fan and almost saw the white light in the process, and then returning to finish his book, On Writing, I felt the same. I embodied his words on a spiritual level. His tone and style inked into my soul like a deep hand-poked tattoo.
Slowly, I felt the rhythm again. Slowly, my love for writing, creating, and sharing my thoughts on the art of living by design seeped back into me.
It’s not over. I still have 4 more months to finish my degree. But I have a newfound respect for the craft of writing and its role in my life.
I’m not a great writer, I’m not even a good writer. But the act of showing up again and again, and trying, is what lights my soul with a beam of white light (not the kind that kills you).
There are obviously many details that I’ve left out. And I don’t want this post to be some narcissistic account on how I ‘survived.’ Many people have it far worse than I ever will.
But I do want to leave you with this: there is hope. You have to believe there is. Because I never had a male role-model present in my life, books like Pressfield’s, King’s, and many more — the Dale Carnegie’s and Tony Robbin’s of the world — have been a source of Virtual Mentorship to me.
Books (and writing) have given me the courage to be my own hero.
Without books, I have no clue what I would do.
You are not alone in your struggles.
Be your own hero.
Josh.
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