Dear Reader, Dear Friend.

Dear Reader, dear Friend. 

I made it! I reached the end of Chapter 2 at last. And now I have this opportunity to step outside of story-mode once again, and just casually talk with you about what this is all about.

Firstly, I wanted to stop and thank you for just being here in the first place. Whether you have been following my blog from the beginning, or have casually skimmed through a story or two, I am so grateful that you would spend the time reading about the adventures and tribulations of my life. I have spent a lot of time writing these stories - drafting, editing, disliking, scrapping, rewriting - so it means the world to me that you are here with me, reading what I have to say. So with the widest gratitude of my heart, thank you! 

And if you’ve only just found my blog for the first time, welcome! 

Secondly, I just wanted to make a brief comment about the form of the blog. I write each episode as individual short stories , and try my best to make them their own little pockets of entertainment and insight. But at the end of the day, they are all connected, linked by a thread that weaves them all together into the journey that is, well, my life. There are many reasons why I am writing the blog like this, reasons I will get to explore later to hopefully inspire others to start documenting their own journeys, or at least take up the practice of journalling. But the main reason is that it gives me a long and ever evolving story to tell; a story I can write all the way up until my final breath. And perhaps only then can I really call it a ‘Heroes Journey’. 

In the beginning, I wanted to explore ‘The Heroes Journey’, and how we can integrate this idea into our own lives. Throughout chapters 1 and 2, I discussed my thoughts on ideas such as Mastery, Art, Life Purpose, Adventure, Destiny, Self-Actualization and Spirituality, while sharing my story of moving to Queenstown and finding my true path in life. But as I carried on my way, I started to develop a sense of unworthiness. I didn’t feel like my own life, as it were, was congruent with what I was writing and how I was writing it. If you read further; if you read some stories from Chapters 3 and 4 to come, you will see the foolish mistakes and major blunders I made on my journey. When I made them, I almost felt embarrassed by how I was portraying myself in my own blog, but I was already committed to telling the story chronologically, and telling it correctly. I would look at the title of the blog: ‘Heroes Journey,’ and cringe. What the hell? I’m no hero! Why did I name it that?! I should have named it ‘A Fools Blind Wish!’

So, over the course of my blogs runtime, I’ve steered further away from the original intention to provide Insight, and have been heading more in the direction of Story. I am not a professional by any stretch of the word. Nor am I an academic; I studied Hospitality Management, but barely. I was more focussed on following my own calling in Music and Writing; in the Arts - and even in these fields I am still a young novice. All I can do is walk my own Journey, and try to make a good story out of it. I just hope it's entertaining to read!

In any case, I feel like I’ve come a long way in my blog so far. But as a matter of fact, I’m further away from my goal than I was when I started. It may sound absurd, but it’s true. What is my goal? I want to write from the present day, like I’m doing so right now, on the 6th of June, 2019! But I am severely losing the race against time. The story is still lingering in the February of 2018, and I'm progressing at a rate of 1 story per month. Oh dear - I accidentally created 3 more stories in the time it has taken me to write one!

So, I’ve given up my pursuit to catch up to myself. For now, at least. I’m more concerned about telling the story at hand, and doing it full justice. Chapters 3 and 4 are quite fun, but there’s a few things I would like share from my background that set up what is to come. 

So, I introduce the Origin Stories!

One of the themes I wrote down when brainstorming the blog was ‘exploring childhood’. I touched on this idea in a few of my earlier stories: (Understanding my Video Game Self, Insights from an MMORPG, Discovering the Warrior Within, and Discovering Life Purpose). But I feel like this is a whole can of worms I barely even scratched with the can opener. And it's a vastly different thing for everybody. On my own journey, I learned so much about who I was and what I was here to do by digging into my childhood, and wondering why things happened as they did.

What I discovered is that Hindsight is an extraordinarily powerful thing! A tool we can use… If you gaze into your past with a fresh perspective, you might unravel things you never expected to find; treasures or traumas you buried and forgot about.

To delve more into this idea, I’m going to hark back to 5 stories from my past that bespeak the origins of ‘Joshua St Clair’. They are five stories that lay the framework for what my Journey is about, and serve to contextualise Chapter 3 and onwards with a bit of flavour. It’s a flashback series, a blast from the past. The foreshadowing, the friendships, the destined discoveries - sometimes they keys to the future are within the stories of our past. 

That’s all I really wanted to say for now. I will be doing this between every chapter; just a little update about my thoughts on the blog and where it’s heading. I guess I might see you on the other side. 

Happy Journeying! 

- Josh