Unearthing Myself: A Hero’s Journey Through Travel, Healing, and Personal Transformation

Not all who wander are lost—some are excavating.

“People transform as a result of three major causes: trauma, unexpected powerful experiences, and consciously intended journeys.”
-Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey

I didn’t realize I was on a hero’s journey until long after it began. Back then, it didn’t feel noble—it felt like confusion, burnout, disillusionment. Like everything I was supposed to do kept falling apart, and I couldn’t figure out why.

The Hero’s Journey is a universal framework that shows up in myth, storytelling, and real life: a call, a challenge, a transformation, a return. I explore these kinds of journeys in this post on spiritual travel—but this one? This one’s mine.

What I see now is that I wasn’t just lost. I was being rerouted.

Through chronic illness, spiritual unraveling, failed jobs, and solo travel across the world, I kept searching—for freedom, clarity, meaning. And slowly, like a careful excavation, I began to dig through the layers. Some were mine. Some inherited. Some dumped on me by religion, culture, or family. But each one held a clue to who I really was beneath it all.

This blog post isn’t just an origin story. It’s an offering—for anyone else who feels buried under too much for too long.

✧ I’ve added reflection prompts throughout this post—little trail markers, if you will. Use them however you like: journal, daydream, or just take a mental note. This is your path too.

Maybe you’ve been chasing the “right path” and wondering why it still doesn’t feel like yours. Maybe you’ve already left the path, and you’re still sifting through the rubble.

Wherever you are, this is my map—and a reminder that the journey inward is just as brave as the journey outward.

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1. The Ordinary World → The Restlessness

In every Hero’s Journey, the story starts in the “Ordinary World.” It’s the life the hero was told to live: the expected path, the rules, the roles they were given before they ever had a chance to question them. It looks stable on the outside, but inside, something is already stirring.

📚 In stories like The Hobbit, the Ordinary World is the Shire—safe, predictable, a little boring. In The Lion King, it’s Pride Rock before the stampede. It’s the place where everything seems fine on the surface, but something inside the hero is already stirring.

For me, that world was layered. I grew up in an interfaith family. We celebrated Jewish holidays, attended church, and were deeply involved in both religious tradition and community life. My dad taught us how Christianity and Judaism connected, but the more I learned (and the more I moved), the more questions I had.

From Sunday school to public school, from church culture to high school debates, I was already starting to wrestle with the deeper stuff: Who gets to say what’s true? Why do we follow these rules?

Still, I wanted to “do life right” (according to society, religion and family expectations). I got the degree, got the internship, played by the rules. Advertising was supposed to be my career. I was ambitious, motivated, and creative—but something always felt… off. I couldn’t put it into words then. I just knew I didn’t quite fit.

🔍 Reflection Prompt: What did your “Ordinary World” look like? Were there early signs that something wasn’t right—or moments when you began to question the script you were given?

2. The Call to Adventure → But Not the One You Expected

Every hero eventually hears a call; an invitation to leave the familiar behind. But the call isn’t always thrilling. Sometimes it comes as collapse, crisis, or the quiet ache that the life you worked for is slipping through your fingers.

📚 In The Hunger Games, Katniss doesn’t volunteer because she wants to—she does it because her sister is chosen. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s “call” arrives in the form of a dangerous burden. Most heroes don’t seek the journey. The journey finds them.

For me, the call wasn’t a moment. It was a slow unraveling—starting with the 2008 recession. I had done everything “right”: earned my degree, landed a dream internship, showed up at big agency interviews in NYC. Then the economy tanked, and every plan I had fell apart.

I didn’t want a detour. I wanted stability, direction, a real career. Instead, I was scrambling; freelancing, applying to anything, doing video work for church camps and freelancing using the few connections I had, mostly for scraps or as a “volunteer”.

Eventually, I went to seminary—not because I planned to work in ministry, but because I needed answers (and it was the one program I could afford financially). I wanted to understand my faith, my past, and the cracks forming under both. I worked in the media department during grad school and spent my summers making videos at camps before starting to go on archaeological digs in Israel.

The seed for doing archaeology was planted years earlier, during a family trip to Israel in 2012—wedged between a summer working at camp and a string of job rejections. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, but I remember standing in Jerusalem, hearing our tour guide talk about participating in an excavation at the City of David.

It lit something in me. I didn’t think archaeology was realistic at the time, but I knew I was craving something that felt alive, purposeful, different.

So later, when I was in seminary, I pitched a photo and video project to a professor. That one idea led to two summers on archaeological digs. And with that, the door opened.

The following year, I found a way back, through an internship photographing archaeological sites for conservation with the Israel Parks Authority. I moved across the world, worked random hostel shifts to support myself, and eventually started a second Master’s degree in archaeology.

At first, it was thrilling; a dream come true. But the cracks formed quickly: erratic shifts, constant moves, mounting health issues, academic pressure. Burnout crept in fast.

I eventually traded overnight hostel shifts for an editing job at the university and tried to hold it all together. For a while, I did. But inside, I was unraveling.

What I thought was the path turned out to be the cliff’s edge. And falling off it? That was the call.

🌀 Reflection Prompt: What has life asked of you that you didn’t plan for? When were you pushed off the “supposed” path—and what did you find in the freefall?

3. Crossing the Threshold

Every Hero’s Journey has a moment where the familiar world is left behind. The rules change. The training wheels come off. And while the “call” may have started things, crossing the threshold is when the transformation really begins.

📚 In The Matrix, Neo swallows the red pill. In Moana, she sails past the reef. In Harry Potter, it’s the moment he steps onto Platform 9¾. There’s no undoing it after this.

For me, that threshold was moving to Israel—not just to travel, but to live, study, and dive into the layers of history that had haunted and intrigued me for years.

I started grad school in archaeology expecting to deepen my knowledge—but what happened went far beyond academics. As I dug through the ancient past in my coursework and fieldwork, I began to unearth buried pieces of myself.

The questions got harder. The stakes got higher. And the costs? They weren’t just academic; they were physical, emotional, and spiritual.

My health started to slip. The burnout I’d been carrying built up fast under pressure: no time to rest, long hours, constant transitions. I was dealing with chronic conditions, constant exhaustion, and loneliness in a culture that was still new to me.

At the same time, my relationship with religion, which was already uneasy, started to come undone for good.

Even before seminary, I’d stepped back from church. But I kept going through the motions—visiting new churches, showing up when I didn’t want to—because I felt like I had to. Family, guilt, fear of judgment… all of it kept me tethered longer than I should’ve been. I kept thinking maybe the problem was me. That if I just tried harder, had more faith or picked the right place, it would finally feel right.

It never did.

And then came 2016. For many of us, that election was the line in the sand. The moment we stopped pretending.

The moment we realized we didn’t need permission to walk away—we just needed to stop being afraid of the questions that would follow.

Being in seminary didn’t help. If anything, it made things worse. Between the theology, the power dynamics, and the way women were treated, I finally admitted what I’d been resisting for years: I didn’t belong in this version of faith. I never had.

Even though I had already left the church world, being in Israel made it impossible to ignore how deeply those beliefs had shaped me. It wasn’t just about leaving church structures behind. It was about untangling the way religion still lived in my head—the guilt, the pressure, the fear of being wrong.

The more I studied the ancient world, the more I realized how much of modern faith is built on shaky translations, cultural assumptions, and power structures that were never meant to liberate.

I came looking for clarity. But what I found was something much harder—and more honest.

This wasn’t about figuring out what I believed. It was about starting to write a new story altogether.

🌒 Reflection Prompt: Think back to a threshold you’ve crossed in your own life—a move, a loss, a decision you couldn’t undo. What changed after that moment? What did you leave behind—and what did you begin to uncover?

4. The Tests, Trials & Dark Nights

No Hero’s Journey is complete without the descent: the stretch where everything falls apart, and you’re forced to confront what you’ve been running from. The trials don’t just test your strength. They ask who you really are when nothing makes sense.

📚 In mythology, it’s the belly of the whale. In The Alchemist, it’s Santiago working at the crystal shop, wondering if he’ll ever make it to the pyramids. In real life, it’s the chronic exhaustion, the silent questions, the mornings you can’t get out of bed and the nights you can’t sleep.

For me, the spiral began in Israel. I was in grad school for archaeology, but I was unraveling—physically, emotionally, spiritually. I’d known I had a fibroid since seminary, but no one told me what it could actually do to my body. I didn’t know it was slowly draining my energy, pulling my iron levels down, and leaving me exhausted beyond what I could explain. I thought I was just tired or stressed.

But it was more than that. My brain couldn’t absorb lectures. I’d sit in class, trying to focus, and feel like the words just wouldn’t go in my brain.

I ended my time in Israel with a health scare and my first surgery—a biopsy on a breast mass that, thankfully, was benign. But everything added up. Between long work hours, physical symptoms and emotional overload, I hit a wall.

I moved back to the US thinking maybe I’d get a break to recover, finish my papers, and take a job in film. But the chaos didn’t end. I bounced between family issues, pandemic shutdowns, and new health problems. After years of running, I was finally standing still—and I didn’t like what I saw.

I ended up with a minor knee injury that lasted two years. I was later diagnosed with dangerously low iron, but no one put the pieces together. The doctors gave me pills, not answers. It took years, and relentless self-advocacy, to realize the fibroid was the root cause of my depletion. And by that point, I felt like a shell of myself.

I’d always been someone who moved fast, talked fast, lived fast. But I couldn’t anymore. My brain would tell my body to get up, and my body just… wouldn’t. People noticed. I walked slower, talked slower. I felt like I was aging in real-time.

And while I was in the depths of all this, the world kept moving. Other people seemed to be thriving—building careers, building relationships, looking genuinely happy. I couldn’t help but wonder: why does everyone else seem to be moving forward while I’m sinking?

Somewhere in that rubble, I stopped trying to glue everything back together—and started wondering if maybe I was meant to become something new entirely.

I wrote more about this kind of layered identity in my post on mixed pottery—how, when one group moves into a land already inhabited by another, you can sometimes see their distinct pottery styles merge into something new. A design that holds the story of both peoples, not erased but reshaped.

🪨 I wasn’t just navigating a new landscape. I was standing in the rubble of my old one, sorting through what to keep and what to bury.

🌑 Reflection Prompt: What have been your deepest trials so far? What parts of yourself surfaced in the darkness—and what did you learn to let go of?

5. Finding Tools, Allies, and Inner Wisdom

Every hero faces trials—but eventually, something shifts. A mentor appears. A tool is discovered. A map is found. And while the path isn’t clear yet, a new kind of strength begins to emerge.

📚 In The Wizard of Oz, Glinda reminds Dorothy that she’s always had the power to get home—but she had to believe it first. In The Alchemist, Santiago follows a vision across the world, only to discover the treasure was buried beneath him all along. These tools aren’t magic on their own—but in the hands of someone who’s learning to trust themselves, they become powerful.

After the pandemic lockdowns, I moved back to New Orleans. I was still dealing with a knee injury, eczema, and what I now know were signs of PCOS and a blood-draining fibroid. I didn’t have all the answers, but I knew I needed movement. I booked a 4-country solo trip. I wasn’t at my strongest. I was still injured and exhausted. But I went anyway.

That trip reminded me who I am: someone who doesn’t wait for perfect conditions to begin.

In 2022, I planned another long journey to Turkey, Jordan and Cyprus. At the time, I didn’t have all the answers. I was dealing with exhaustion, unclear symptoms, and a growing sense that something in my body wasn’t right. I booked the trip months before I found out definitively that the fibroid I’d known about for years was causing many of my issues. I canceled the Turkey portion of the trip, hoping to schedule the procedure—but the biopsy came first, and surgery had to wait until I returned.

I didn’t go recklessly—I went intentionally, because I needed something to hold onto.
Not to escape, but to live.

Somehow, travel gave me energy even when nothing else did. Maybe it was adrenaline. Maybe it was the hope I’d been missing.

That trip didn’t fix everything, but it reminded me that I could still choose joy, rest, and curiosity even in the unknown.

Jordan gave me adrenaline and inspiration. Cyprus gave me peace, rest, and healing by the sea.

2023 was another turning point. I had a major allergic reaction that pushed me into finally seeking functional medicine care for my eczema. Around the same time, I started working with a coach who helped me set real boundaries with others—and with myself.

That Fall, I spent over a month in French Polynesia. I arrived early for a blogging retreat but made space before and after to travel solo, work with my coach, and reconnect with myself in a deeper way.

That trip marked a real turning point—one shaped by boundaries, healing, and a renewed belief in myself. I visited ancient sites, connected with indigenous wisdom, and reminded myself that transformation isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it looks like honoring what’s already changing beneath the surface.

By 2024, I was finally putting the pieces together: I had PCOS, high cortisol, mineral imbalances—years of undiagnosed issues. I shifted into full lifestyle healing mode. I went to Sedona to explore the vortexes and ended up finding something deeper: the clarity and conviction I’d been chasing for years.

No, the healing hasn’t been linear. I had setbacks with work, health, relationships and more things. But every trip, every practitioner, every journal page, every stubborn act of faith moved me forward.

It wasn’t a straight path—but it was mine.

At some point in my journey, I came across a symbol that captured this kind of process perfectly: the labyrinth. It’s not a maze, not a puzzle to be solved, and not just a messy, squiggly line—it’s a winding, intentional path inward.

I stopped waiting for someone else to give me permission or offer the perfect plan. I stopped looking for magic “fixes” outside myself. And I started listening to the next right step.

🧭 Reflection Prompt: What tools have helped you in your journey—books, trips, mentors, insights? What’s one thing you did for yourself that shifted your direction, even if it didn’t fix everything?

6. The Return (But Changed)

Every Hero’s Journey ends with the return—not to the way things were, but to something wiser. The hero doesn’t come back unscathed. They return with scars, stories, and offerings forged in the fire.

📚 In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wakes up in Kansas—but she’s not the same girl who left. In The Alchemist, Santiago returns to the place he began, now able to see its treasure. The “end” isn’t the destination. It’s the moment you realize you’re no longer the same.

For me, the return wasn’t a single flight home or a sudden epiphany. It was a slow unfolding—the realization that everything I’ve lived through, questioned, fought for, and rebuilt has shaped something bigger than just me.

This blog, my store, and The Power of Four ebook aren’t just projects. They’re part of that return. They’re how I turn pain into purpose—how I offer tools, stories, and guidance for others walking their own winding paths.

I used to think I had to find the right answer, the perfect path, the flawless strategy. But the truth is, I’ve learned more from sifting through the wreckage than I ever did from following a map.

Now, I’m not just walking my own journey; I’m holding a lantern for others.

Whether you’re navigating chronic illness, spiritual disillusionment, post-breakup rebuilding, or just that quiet ache that there’s more to life—I’m here to say: there is.

And you don’t have to go it alone.

🪔 Reflection Prompt: What have you come back from that changed you? What offerings—big or small—do you now carry that could help someone else find their way?

🦋

There was a point—somewhere in the thick of it—when I realized I wasn’t stuck; I was in a cocoon.

Cocoons are meant to feel tight, dark and disorienting. Everything you were starts to dissolve, and nothing feels clear. But that isn’t failure—that’s transformation.

One of my counselor friends said it best: You don’t rush the cocoon. You let it do its work. And when the time comes, you’ll feel it. The light will start to shine through. You’ll stretch. You’ll move. You’ll realize: I’m not who I was. And I’m not going back.

I didn’t have some grand awakening, but I intuitively knew—I had come out of the cocoon, or was coming out. Things slowly began to shift. Even though my life wasn’t perfect, and I still didn’t have all the answers, I could feel momentum. My energy changed. My mindset changed. I was no longer trying to crawl back to who I used to be.

So if you’re in the cocoon right now, just know—you’re not broken. You’re becoming.

7. Closing: Everyone Has a Journey

Whether you’re stepping out of your Ordinary World or crawling out of your own rubble—you’re not alone.

This blog is my torch for the next traveler.

I don’t have all the answers. I still live with health challenges, question marks, and goals I’m chasing. But I’ve made peace with the fact that the path isn’t always clear. The journey is still unfolding—and I’m walking it with intention now, not fear.

So wherever you are on the map—if you’re seeking healing, growth, or something you can’t quite name yet—I hope what you find here helps light the way.

💬 Every journey’s better with fellow travelers.
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