I’m afraid we’ve turned Joseph Campbell’s wise counsel to “follow our bliss” into a cheap carnival ride, when it was meant to be a battle cry for the human spirit.
If he were alive today, I believe Mr. Campbell would be first to point out that Instagram-curated dreams, trite coffee shop pleasures, fleeting relationships, and making money online by teaching others to make money online are nowhere on the map of a hero’s journey.
What Campbell never had the chance to clarify before he died in 1987, was that there is a difference between the bliss of tucking into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in front of the TV, and the bliss of aligning with one’s essential purpose. The first of those pleasures you pay for with your wallet so you can get more comfortable. The second pleasure you pay for with your comfort so you can get a soul.
In America, we’re led astray from the path of bliss at an early age. In need of attention and love as children, we have no choice but to adopt the values of our caregivers. Growing up in any westernized culture—North America, Europe, or Australia—provides its own brand of safety, but also confines us to a set of consumer habits, expectations of comfort, and fickle patterns of attention that we’re eventually forced to review, or reject, if we want a shot at bliss.
We can’t know what our true bliss is until we’ve done this review. Otherwise, we book brochure vacations, start ill-conceived businesses, pursue goals we abandon at first blush of a challenge, and look for a romantic partner who will fulfill all our needs—borrowing the scripted bliss of our culture—and become quickly bored with the scenery.
Here’s a story about why you should follow your dread instead.
Thin Cultural Ice
My college roommate Dylan was like an adolescent Labrador Retriever, a grown-up looking creature with little impulse control.
“Let’s go skating!” Dylan had excitedly suggested, on a dreary St. Louis evening in early December. In the absence of vehement protest, we piled into Dylan’s car and went to a local outdoor skating rink where hundreds of other students, families, and couples had gathered to recreate in our small college town.
There were six of us. Dylan and his girlfriend Leslie had arrived at school as a couple, the rest of us were new companions. We had only known each other for a few months, having met for the first time at school.
Webster University was a competitive liberal arts program for aspiring actors. Our teachers meant business. I once had an instructor scream at me in the middle of a rehearsal, “You have no clue how to stop being you!” The entire first year of our four-year program was focused—not on acting like somebody else—but on becoming aware of the character we were already playing. The nice girl, the smart kid, the sexy co-ed, the tortured artist. Until we could set our default personalities aside, they told us, portraying a new character was impossible.
I liked Dylan, for two reasons. First, he was like me at the time. A typical, middle-class, high-school-jock kind of guy. Second, he was a little dangerous. Not in an unstable, violent sort of way, but in terms of his social freedom. He just didn’t give a shit what other people thought. In other words, not like me. I cared a lot.
We had only been on the ice a few minutes when Dylan confidently glided over to me with a charming smirk on his face, leaving his girlfriend awkwardly flailing and clawing at thin air as she tried to balance for the first time on ice skates.
“What the hell?” I thought to myself, “That’s not funny.”
But Dylan’s planned mischief went beyond just stranding his girlfriend. He only left her to fend for herself on the ice so that he could swoop over on me and my date, skate between us and replace my girlfriend’s hand with his own. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was—shocked actually.
I’d been obliviously reveling in the perfection of my character. I’d gone off to university, found friends and intimates far away from my childhood home, and managed to embed myself into this picturesque It’s a Wonderful Life winter holiday scene. I was serenely gliding around on this frozen pond, ringed by snow-covered pines, looking perfectly the part of a middle-class American boy with his date and his pals.
Suddenly, I was holding hands with another guy, which in 1981 was an even rarer display of same-gender affection than it is today in America. Dylan was wearing pink mittens, purchased on purpose because he didn’t give a shit, and was now intentionally swinging our hands back and forth, casting convincingly adorable smiles at me as though we’d been in love our whole lives and this romantic skate was a dream come true.
I thought of myself as a risk-taker. Someone who knew how to challenge his own comfort zone. I had theater shows, competitive sports, and school pranks to prove it. But now, without a word spoken, my friend Dylan had flown completely under the radar of my identity defenses, swooped in, and put his heavy thumb on the sore spot of my culturally adopted self-image.
Outwardly, I tried to pretend I was fine with the joke, but internally, I was freaking out about being cast in a role I didn’t audition for. After a few seconds I tried to shake Dylan off, as though a poisonous spider had landed on me, but he knew what he was doing. I was handcuffed in his iron grip while he beamed his charming smile at me, never breaking the adoring-man-partner character.
It took another thirty seconds of mortified hand-holding for it to hit me. The idea of dropping my American boy image filled me with dread, which was exactly what my acting teacher meant about having no idea how to stop being me! A mood of adventure surged inside of me and I resolved to skate hand-in-hand with Dylan until he decided the experiment was over. With every pass we made around the rink my courage, dignity, freedom, and sense of humor were restored. I saw the larger technicolor world that lies beyond the door of dread. Dylan and my acting teacher had pushed me through it—and I was skating in wonder on the other side.
Follow Your Dread
Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”
I believe that no matter how you cut it, the beginning of knowing thyself is not a blissful pursuit. It’s a jarring, sobering wake-up call to lay down our pretensions, artifice, denial, and posturing. The mask we created to satisfy what was expected of us by our family and culture of origin wasn’t supposed to be permanent, but for many of us, it becomes so. Over time, we fool ourselves with the mask—believing it’s actually who we are—and anything that threatens to dislodge it fills us with dread.
Following your dread, however, is like discovering a trap door at the bottom of your soul.* What feels like a descent into hell is actually an escape tunnel, leading us from the prison of a caged character to the freedom of an unbridled self.
The hero’s journey is not only measured by the monsters we tame, but by the moments of dread we embrace. If we want true bliss, we need to raise our hand and go first when life asks for volunteers, speak our pain when we want to hide and run, embrace our remorse and call the friend we hurt, audition for roles we’d be embarrassed to play, and publish work that nobody may read.
Without following our dread we can’t know ourselves. It’s the only way to discover who we’ve become by default, so we can choose our character on purpose.
I’m deeply grateful to Dylan for introducing me to this dangerous and liberating principle. But I believe we all have an inner Dylan, a disruptive and intelligent spirit that we ourselves can bring back to life by taking intelligent risks. In fact, my entire vocation now surrounds supporting others to do just that. If you want to learn to create your own hero’s journey each and every day and reach the bliss that is just beyond the door of dread, you can join me here.
We’ll hold hands. I’ll walk you through it.
*I didn’t coin the term, “follow your dread.” A friend of mine, Stuart Goodnick, who is a meditation teacher did. He and his partner run a podcast called The Mystical Positivist, which you can find here.
*Reference to a phrase authored by Regina Sara Ryan and which appears in her book, Praying Dangerously. Highly recommended.
what if we taught people how not to make money online? that could be a big biz...
I so enjoyed reading this on the Tube on the way into The City.
Since I’ve know you, your spirit - and your writing - is imbued with that “mood of adventure”. The great thing about It’s a Wonderful Life is that George Bailey also confronts his dread to unlock the trap door at the bottom of his soul in order to live an unbridled life.
The only shame about this piece is that there isn’t a photo with you and Dylan holding hands with your pink mittens!