I'm Jen Klassen 

Part 3: Coming Home, Chapter 4: Quiet Return

We’ve all heard of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey: an archetypal myth involving an unlikely hero who experiences a form of disruption to his life as he knows it. He hears a call to adventure, an invitation that propels him out of the ordinary and into the realm of extraordinary where he encounters opportunities that cannot be ignored, challenges to overcome, and mentors and allies to help guide him along the way. The Hero carries with him an unhealed wound and is drawn into a journey that, through conquering and overcoming, ultimately leads to victory, transformation, and a triumphant return. He is  changed and carries with him wisdom earned through the journey.

In her seminal work If Women Rose Rooted: a life changing journey to authenticity and belonging, author Sharon Blackie writes of a different initiation, saying, “women absolutely do need to make the journey; we do not, however, need to make the same journey which the hero makes. Our journeys are different, our stories are all our own. It’s time we told our own stories, outlined our journeys for ourselves. We don’t need Heros to tell us who to be.”

“The heroine’s journey”, she goes on to say, “leads us firmly back into our own sense of belonging to this Earth”. While the hero promises wholeness through overcoming, Sharon offers an invitation that values identity over accomplishment, and sovereignty over success.

While the hero seeks victory, the heroine seeks sovereignty.

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Day after day, I returned to my wicker chair and stared at the poster boards taped to my bedroom wall, adding words and phrases as I re-membered myself. In doing so, I returned deeper towards who I was before the world and my well-meaning upbringing handed me their script detailing who I needed to be and what I should want.

I was naming old dreams and along with them, some desires I’d never dared say out loud; dreams that felt dangerous because they were unconventional and threatened to draw attention to myself —as if that was ever allowed. God forbid I take up too much space.

In the fall of the second year, I was well into my descent; my own heroine’s journey and quest to reclaim my sovereignty. I was coming back to myself and waking from ways I’d spent much of my life living on autopilot. At the same time, I oscillated between hope and fear—sometimes within minutes—as I faced a future that was still uncertain and undefined.

With growing clarity, I could name my values and recognize what I believed, and, just as importantly, what I no longer did. Many of the beliefs I had inherited no longer fit the woman I was becoming. I had known this for a long time. And yet, my fear of losing love and belonging, and my worry about disappointing people kept me from living my life unfiltered and on my own terms. In the comfort of my own home, with my children and the friends I trusted, I was seen and able to be fully myself. But outside of this small, safe circle, I was still compromising my authenticity for safety by pleasing, shrinking, bending, and conforming.  

The real work was learning how to stand in my own truth without abandoning myself. It felt almost impossible.

Sovereignty wasn’t about standing alone— it was about refusing to abandon myself in order to stay connected.

I was no longer falling, or so I thought, when a health crisis with my mother carried me further into that same work. Without going into too much detail about the emergency, I will disclose how I responded and how that response reshaped my understanding of what freedom actually requires. I was about to learn that the heroine’s arrival into sovereignty does not come with a triumphant victory cry, but something far quieter.

The crisis didn’t just test me, it exposed some unfinished business I’d been working around. I would love to say my response during this time was heroic and composed, but in reality, it exposed deep familial patterns still unresolved in my psyche.

So, I threw myself into managing and caretaking, fulfilling my role of the good daughter and completely losing my steadiness in the process. I was overwhelmed and understandably anxious, but what surprised me most was the level of anger and rage I felt during this time. Anger has always been my go-too response to any uncomfortable situation— an easy reach which always provides the sense of power and control I’m looking for, though ultimately false. It was unexpected in this situation, however, as, in my understanding, a family health crisis should provoke feelings of care, tenderness, and compassion.

One night as I lay in my bed spiralling with anger and overwhelm, I had a flash of a photograph of myself as a 14-year-old girl. With a sense that I needed to go find it, I crawled out of bed and into my office in search of it. Once located, it hit me that the girl in this picture was the same teenager living inside me right now. She was full of rage at a world that was telling her to conform to its expectations and secure belonging by pressing herself into a mold that didn’t quite fit.

This 14-year-old needed freedom to explore her options and the safety to try new things; to fail and try again without losing love and belonging.

At 51, I was still, in many ways, stuck in that childhood bedroom, holding big dreams that felt wildly dissident within the context of my small Mennonite upbringing. Alongside them were some ordinary dreams of children and a home of my own.

I didn’t just have big dreams —there was a lot I wanted to express, too, and I learned early how to keep it quiet.

When I think back to this young woman on brink of adulthood, I can see more than anything that what she wanted was the freedom to choose — not necessarily a different life, but a life chosen freely. It was what she still wanted. And with this discovery came the most unexpected gift in the form of an incredible dream that changed everything.

Here, I was met by an older, wiser version of myself— my crone, as I like to think of her. The wise woman gently but firmly took me on a journey, bringing me face to face with the people throughout my life toward whom I carried resentment; those who, in subtle and overt ways, taught me that my voice needed to be tempered, my presence reduced, and my belonging conditional.

The crone took me down into the center their lives, and showed me the origins of their own need to control; fear that all but consumed them, and drove them to smother the oxygen of my largeness. I saw own my failed attempts to reclaim my power by casting them out of my presence through judgement, superiority, and dismissiveness.  As they all stood there, before me, I resisted the urge to run. With authority, the crone instructed me saying, “stay here, Jen. Just let them be here. This won’t break your heart, it’ll make it stronger”.

And this, although a dream, is the most courageous thing I have ever done in my life. As the tornado of emotions blew through, it took every last bit of physical and emotional strength I possessed to stay in the room and hold my ground without fleeing or casting them out with my rage. The storm reached its crescendo and I burst into tears of surrender, finally letting go of all that had held me back. And the thing is, it was never them who held me back. It was my blame and resentment toward them, and the way I stayed tethered to those stories—theirs and mine—that once made sense.

And the crone said the most powerful and profound words I have ever heard:

Your power doesn’t come from standing on top of the people who have hurt you. It comes from forgiving them. And even more powerful still, inviting them to the table.

And just like that, I was free.

Freedom did not come in the form of angry rebellion or outraged resistance. Power and sovereignty were found where I least expected to find them; they were earned through forgiveness and quietly making peace with my past and the people who had their own stories to reckon with. Forgiveness broke the thread that kept me bound to old narratives of belonging, safety, and love. I no longer needed to organize my life around what they did or didn’t give me. I let it go, let them go, and then quietly, without fanfare or fireworks, moved on.

It was time. I had been waiting to emerge from the darkness of my cocoon. But what needed to happen, I realized, was not emerging as something new, but rather, a shedding of old layers. I had grown and those old, worn ways of being in the world that hadn’t grown with me. I was free now to live my life unfiltered and on my own terms; I was ready to stand in my own truth without abandoning myself. Not through defiance, but something much quieter and more powerful. It was time to write a new story. This cycle was complete and whatever came next, I would survive it without disappearing.