Omar Ferreira and his wife, Jesse, host the ASQ podcast and guide people through what they call a soul’s quest, a blend of psychology, philosophy, and mythology built around the hero’s journey. Both came to the work through experiences that unsettled their sense of who they were. For Omar, the turning point came when the youth development organization he had devoted himself to moved away from the values that had made the work meaningful. For Jesse, professional achievement failed to bring the recognition and fulfillment she expected, while painful workplace experiences prompted her to question a life she thought she had planned. She also faced the separate adjustment of being a mother whose grown children no longer needed her in the same way. Their conversation returns to a question that can surface in any of these transitions: who am I, apart from the roles I have learned to fill?
Most people can name themselves easily by what they do and whom they serve. Teacher. Father. Manager. The one who holds the family together. These roles are real, and many of them are good. The trouble is how completely a life can come to rest on them, so that when one goes away, through a layoff, a reorganization, a child who no longer needs daily care, or a parent’s death, the ground goes with it. From the outside it looks like a job or a season ending. Underneath, an identity is coming apart.
When that happens, withdrawal can be the first pull. Familiar pain may feel easier to inhabit than an uncertain future. Going looking asks something different of a person: a willingness to move before knowing where the movement will lead. There may be stretches of searching followed by a retreat into what feels safe. The hero’s journey offers an image for this passage, a departure from the known into territory that unsettles who we thought we were.
Part of what makes the collapse so disorienting is the checklist most of us were handed early. Get the degree, then the next degree. Be the loyal employee, the good spouse, the good parent. Somewhere at the end of the list, the promise goes, you will have arrived. People will finally see you, the promotion will come, and everything will settle into place. Yet a person can study toxic leadership, earn the doctorate, and return to a workplace that has scarcely changed. The achievement may be substantial. The recognition may never come. Meanwhile, the list keeps generating new items, and the destination it promised remains on the horizon.
The traditions have long understood that this kind of passage happens alone, or close to it. Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness before his public ministry began. Moses was on Sinai for forty days. Siddhartha sat beneath the bodhi tree, and Muhammad went again and again to the cave of Hira before the first revelation came. These are different stories carrying different meanings, and they should not be pressed into one shape. What they share is the withdrawal itself, a stretch of time away from the roles and voices that normally define a person, after which something new could be heard. Even with a loving partner nearby, the crossing has a solitary quality. Support helps enormously, though no one else can do the walking.
Nobody describes that stretch as pleasant. It looks like waking at three in the morning because the mind will not stop. It looks like crying more than expected, spending savings while waiting for clarity, and asking quietly whether all of this makes a person a failure. Meanwhile the culture keeps up a steady noise in the background: be productive, be responsible, stay busy, you should be further along by now. Jung’s idea of the shadow offers one way to think about these neglected parts of ourselves. Turning toward them can be uncomfortable, especially when keeping busy has long been the way to avoid them.
The dissolution does not only come through work. One of its quieter forms arrives when children grow up. A parent can genuinely love the independence of grown children and still feel the floor drop when photographs arrive from a dinner they were not invited to. Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, in 1923, that our children come through us but not from us. The line is usually read as comfort. It is also a hard teaching, because it means the role of being needed every day was always meant to end. The parent remains a parent. The capacity changes, and accepting that change can take far longer than anyone expects.
Men often face their own version of this without words for it. Many were raised to treat feelings as weakness, and the things that once defined a man’s usefulness, physical strength and the taming of land and weather, are not required the way they once were. So a man frustrated by a teenager he cannot reach, a divorce he did not want, or a supervisor who rides him no matter how hard he works often has nowhere to put any of it. If he says it out loud, he expects to be ridiculed. The despair goes underground. That is part of why a culture with warm showers on demand and more food than at any point in history is also living through a mental health crisis. Comfort has not touched the question underneath.
One of the most useful maps for this passage comes from Nietzsche. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he describes three metamorphoses of the spirit. The camel kneels and accepts whatever load is placed on it, which is how all of us begin. We do not choose our families, our bodies, or the place we were born, and the expectations arrive along with them. The camel goes into the desert and becomes a lion, and the lion’s task is to fight a great dragon whose name is Thou Shalt, every one of its scales glittering with an obligation. Only after that does the spirit become a child, which Nietzsche describes as innocence, a new beginning, a sacred yes.
This is where the map deserves some pressure. Read quickly, it sounds like permission to tear down every obligation a person has ever been given. That reading does not hold. Some of the thou shalts on the dragon’s scales are worth keeping, and someone who destroys them all indiscriminately has not become a child, only a lion with nothing left to fight. The lion’s real work seems closer to testing. Which of these obligations are actually mine, and which were placed on me by people who needed me to fill a function? The child that comes after still has commitments. What has changed is that the yes to each one is fresh, chosen with curiosity rather than carried out of habit. Nietzsche gave the lion the words “I will.” The child’s yes is quieter, and it may matter more.
A smaller shift helps in the middle of all this. The question “Why did this happen to me?” is natural, and in grief it may be unavoidable, but it has no floor. It can be asked for years without producing anything but a deeper pit. “What is this teaching me?” opens a different door. Asking it leaves the pain intact and makes no claim that the loss was secretly good, while turning the experience into material to work with rather than a verdict to live under. Many of the people who end up guiding others through a hard passage are simply the ones who asked that second question long enough to have something to give.
None of this requires a grand vocation waiting at the end. The image of Indra’s net, developed most fully in Huayan Buddhism, pictures a jewel at every knot of an infinite web, each one reflecting all the others. A person living from who they actually are affects everything around them, whether the expression of that turns out to be teaching, building, raising grandchildren, or making the best sandwich anyone in the neighborhood has ever eaten. The point of expression has to be found, and nobody else can prescribe it. Nature never settled on a single color, and there is little reason to expect people to.
The question waits underneath every title a person holds, and it tends to surface the moment one of them falls away. Who are you, apart from what you do and whom you serve? It may be worth sitting with before the next role ends, while there is still enough quiet to notice what your body does when an honest answer comes close.
Listen to the full conversation with Omar and Jesse
© Dr. Doug Gulbrandsen