Some films entertain us. Others quietly stay with us long after the credits have rolled.
The Odyssey was one of those films for me.
I went expecting an epic adventure. What I didn’t expect was to come home still thinking about it days later. Not because of the action or the spectacle, although both were impressive, but because beneath the journey I found myself reflecting on something much deeper. It seemed to be asking timeless questions about what it means to be human.
The older I get, the more I think our lives are made up of odysseys.
Most of us won’t sail across dangerous seas or outwit mythical creatures, but we all experience periods where life asks something difficult of us. A bereavement. A relationship ending. Becoming a parent. Illness. Trauma. Losing our sense of who we are. Finding ourselves again.
Today’s monsters often look different. They arrive as burnout, perfectionism, anxiety, grief, relationship breakdown, or the quiet feeling that somewhere along the way we’ve lost ourselves.
None of us chooses these moments, yet they shape us.
Carl Jung wrote about the process of individuation, the lifelong journey of becoming who we truly are. He believed that much of life involves meeting parts of ourselves we’d rather avoid. Our fears. Our vulnerabilities. Our anger. Our grief. The parts we hide from others, and sometimes from ourselves.
It struck me that Odysseus isn’t simply travelling across the world. He’s travelling through himself.
Every challenge strips away another illusion. Every loss changes him. Every setback forces him to discover qualities he didn’t know he possessed.
By the time he returns home, he isn’t the man who left.
Isn’t that true of all of us?
One of the hardest lessons I’ve come to recognise is that growth rarely feels like growth while we’re living through it.
It usually feels like uncertainty.
It feels like questioning everything.
Like letting go of an old version of yourself before you’ve discovered who you’re becoming.
It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s deeply painful.
We live in a culture that celebrates transformation but rarely talks about the cost of it.
We admire resilience, yet we often overlook what resilience actually asks of us.
We love before-and-after stories, but the most important part is usually everything in the middle. The confusion. The setbacks. The moments where you wonder whether you’re moving forwards at all.
That middle place is where change happens.
I’ve had the privilege of witnessing people walk through their own odysseys. They often begin by wanting life to return to how it was before the anxiety, the trauma or the loss.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, something shifts.
The longing to return gives way to something else.
Instead of searching for the person they used to be, they begin discovering the person they are becoming.
Not because life becomes easier.
Not because pain disappears.
But because they begin to trust themselves in a way they couldn’t before.
Perhaps that’s what I found so moving about The Odyssey.
Home isn’t simply a place we return to.
Sometimes home is the place inside ourselves that we spend a lifetime trying to find.
Jung believed that we don’t become whole by avoiding the difficult parts of ourselves. We become whole by turning towards them with curiosity and courage.
Perhaps that’s why The Odyssey still matters. Not because it tells us heroes never struggle, but because it reminds us that every meaningful journey changes us.
We rarely become who we are in spite of life’s storms.
More often, we become who we are because of them.