Creating Mythology

During those moments when my life was falling apart and my eyes were too tired to peer into the limp ambiguity of my unfurling future, I would find myself looking into the past, only to see unrelated and disparate islands of experience that did not collectively build into anything beautiful. It felt like my life was meaningless, purposeless and directionless. It felt like I was just randomly stumbling through life. I desperately wanted to live a life where all of my actions and experiences had meaning and progressively built towards a masterpiece. And the more I thought, the more I realized that no matter how unrelated the events of my past seemed, they were definitively connected by a thread. That common thread of destiny was my life journey itself! What if we could customize that thread? What if we could weave patterns with that thread that could bring together the different parts of our history to guide our future?

That is when I started thinking about creating my own personal mythology which is an artistic interpretation of my life journey.

The Purpose of Creating a Personal Mythology

• Creating Continuity: One of the objectives of creating a personal mythology is to analyze each of the key moments of life to create a storyline that connects them. Example 1: How do the lives of my grandmother, mother and my sister connect? Are there any themes, ideas, dreams, traumas, and skills that have progressed across the generations? Example 2: How do the different layers of my history connect? Is there some thematic story that links my years as a high school teacher to those as a postdoc?
• Destiny Planning: Often when trying to analyze and thematically connect the key moments of life, one will find many ideas or moments that do not connect. This provides the unique opportunity for a person to plan for their future and chose an incremental step that has meaning and purpose because it connects to a previously unconnected point. Example 1: Teaching high school is a core part of my personality, however once I left WHS I was disconnected from it. Wanting to extend that storyline, I created the WHS-Brandeis Summer Research Progam and that evolved into my masterpiece, the WHS Research Course which, in part, will allow me to connect my former WHS students with the current ones Because this requires that I connect my past to my future, it makes the trajectory of my history interwoven and circular as opposed to segregated and linear.
• Digestion of Trauma: Often, the most unresolved and disconnected parts of our lives are those that involve trauma. If left alone, trauma can fester in our unconscious minds and rob us of the language needed to communicate with it. One way to digest trauma is to weave it into our narrative, giving it space to slowly leak its poison where it can be purified through each cycle. Example 1: My mother experienced a series of traumatic experiences starting from her childhood into her adulthood. To connect each of the traumatic experiences and to study their effect on her soul, we are collaborating on a podcast on depression.
• Artwork: Once a mythology has been created and core thematic progressions have been identified, they can be expressed through artwork which represents a person's journey through life.

The Dangers of Creating a Narrative/Mythology

Mythologies, narratives and storytelling play a central role in the human experience and can have great power that can sometimes override rational thought. Without preventative measures and rational oversight that can impede the growth of superstitions, these mythologies can cause their own traumas and inject poison into the growth of a person or even a society. For example, Astrology is a type of mythology (using my definition) that has some utility because it helps people connect various parts of their lives and provides a framework to make sense of a world that is often unpredictable and uncontrollable. For example, in some situations, a healing realization is that there are some aspects of the world that cannot be changed and therefore the only action a person can do is brace for the upcoming storm. This can also be communicated through the language of Astrology with the idea that perhaps a given trauma was unavoidable because Saturn was in particular spatial position relative to the Earth. However, it is when this form of communication becomes cancerous and begins to bleed into reality that people make suboptimal and non-scientific decisions that can lead to significant damage. Therefore, one of the dangerous of mythology is creating connections where they do not exist or forcing symmetries where they may not be needed. Part of the beauty of this world is that somethings just don't connect and that somethings are inherently asymmetrical.

My different Mythologies:

• Family Mythology: My grandmother is in the final stage of aging and to understand her legacy, I will first examine several historical events and then develop a mythology to connect these events to explore the progression of common ideas and themes across the generations: my grandmother -> my mother and her sister -> my sister and cousin -> my niece.
• SOMDEland is my mini-universe and it consists of a series of symbols, rituals, ceremonies, and philosophies, however it isn't a mythology because it doesn't consist of a number of experiences connected by interpretation. Within the SOMDEland universe exists the Herpes Queendom Mythology which weaves together real events in the life of my pet rats with a larger meaning and philosophy of life.

Next Steps

• Stage 1: Develop my family's mythology and represent it through an artistic online storybook adding some symbolism from SOMDEland. Also develop the Herpes Queendom Mythology and have it exist in the present (as opposed to entirely in the past because both rats have sadly passed away).
  • One idea is to take the themes of trauma and victory and represent them as an artistic children's book for the new generation. Then, as the child grows into an adult, have books that represent the same themes with greater detail, adding more and more realism and facts. Then, once the child is an adult, they can become authors of the mythology.
• Stage 2: Read the academic literature on the definition and properties of mythologies and how other people, groups and societies have created their mythologies.
• Stage 3: Develop a methodology for the development of personal mythologies.
• Stage 4: Develop more on the idea of creating mythologies for the digestion of trauma and perhaps collaborate with psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists and storytellers.
• Stage 5: With this content, develop and teach a course, and based on feedback iterate the model.