For much of human history, men and women lived by myth, the stories of our lives. The world was full of magic and promise, adventure and change. Technology and science, media and communications have stolen our stories from us, taken away our belief in ourselves and our lives and our ability to bring them into being.  In our time, we turn to things outside of us to tell our stories – lawyers tell us what to do, doctors tell us if we are health, bankers tell us if we are rich,  the news tells us what to think about our world,  marketers tell us what we need to have and to spend to buy off the fear that has become the story of so many of us. The magic and mystery  – the sense of hope – iis gone out of our lives, and so many people have been robbed of their dreams, fleeing to hollow lives of terror and reaction. I know this because I was one of them.

I realized a few years ago, when I was nearly drowning in fear, that this had become my story, my myth: the fearful man, the incompetent man, the loveless man, the failing man, the man whose family had betrayed him, the man who lived in a dangerous and menacing world, the men who would become sick without his pills and tests, the poor father and friend, the hapless men struggling throughout his life against the many roadblocks the world had thrown before him. The hopeless and frightened man.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that we are the thing we see in the mirror, our moral selves bounded by the stories of ourselves, the stories we saw in that  reflection. Freud said we are our dreams.

I began to chip away at fear when I wanted my own story back, it belonged to me. I began to tell my own story, create my own myth, since the myths of the world had fallen out of favor in a world suddenly too smart for its own good. I stopped letting doctors and lawyers and new channels tell the story of me, my world, stopped robbing me of my myth. I began to tell a different story to the face in the mirror. I wanted love in my life, and I would find it, and open myself up to it. I would change the story of that man. He was not in perpetual struggle. He was good. He was creative. He was strong, competent, creative.

He did not live in a dangerous world, the stories of the new media were not the stories of his life, his world, he was a healthy man who could decide for himself if he was healthy or not, and the world was not filled with roadblocks but opportunities, golden shafts of light everywhere, if only he would look. And he did. The world was a place of light and color, and it was everywhere, and he would capture those images in order to create a new story for himself, a new myth.

Joseph Campbell wrote that religion and politics and technology and money has failed us, overwhelmed us,  robbed us of our myths, and our own sense of controlling our life and our world. Their world, he foresaw, a world without myth, would become an angry and blind and empty place filled with arguments, anger and hopelessness. We could only save ourselves on the hero’s journey, on the call to adventure, by creating our own story, our own myth.

I think often of the young writer who told me in a dark Chicago bar that he would never be a writer, it was too difficult. I put my hands on his shoulders and said, tell yourself this story instead: you are a writer, will be one. That is your story, your myth, your destiny. Go live it. And he has.