Come, Friend, Die to Live

It has been two months since I left home to embark on my college journey. Two months of change and excitement. Two months of life away from scenes that are dear and familiar to me. But two months also of learning and growth.

It is an inescapable truth that there is something lost when you leave home. I do not suppose I can return home just as I left it and be the same sister and daughter I was in August. There is, however, a feeling of death and resurrection in my shift from childhood to independent adulthood. Childhood still resides as memory in my heart and mind, and now there is something more, something bigger I am learning which I can offer to my family and friends.

I left home, but life goes on there without me. Nieces and nephews grow up, siblings’ lives continue to change and develop, and I will never know all of it when I go home. When I see everyone again they will still be the same people in the same places, but circumstances have changed for good.

It is a good lesson for me, especially as an aspiring fiction author, to experience this change of life. I have certainly learned about the Hero’s Journey and the important “Door of No Return” which the hero passes through on his way to adventure, but now I get to experience it firsthand. Already, from what little I have experienced in two months, I can grasp how the important notions and checkpoints on the way to change have intrigued the minds of authors and readers throughout the centuries. It all makes sense.

Man’s journey in life is messy and painful.

Yet – and this is the real motivation for stories – there is light and joy at the end of the arduous road. There are both returns and new beginnings to look forward to in life.

As I think more on life’s journey and the Hero’s Journey, it becomes startlingly clear how important this first step of leaving home is to the story. The writer does not only want their hero to step out of the home on a journey; there must be complete change in the home and in the journeying soul so that there is no chance of really ‘going back.’ Old things disappear and leave behind the brightest, happiest memories of themselves in the fond retrospect.

Good stories must be told. In writers there is an imperative need to offer resonating stories to readers whose minds have been dulled by lesser art which serves only to entertain without suffering. The best writers will delve into the depths of the pain and sorrow – which come with loss – and offer an outstanding crossing of their hero’s first threshold. It is a reality in life and story that a story’s poignancy is largely determined by those first chapters where the world changes forever.

So we must not be afraid to cry a little. Your characters and readers alike will be grateful for the pain endured throughout the story when they see how good the resurrection is. Allow the heartbreak, and see how much greater the healed, restored person is for it!

Copyright 2022 Maggie Rosario