Moxie On Monday: Light Your Own Way: How to Become the Heroine of Your Own Story

What if the path you’re meant to follow doesn’t even exist yet? What if the roadmap you’ve spent your life clinging to—the one drawn by parents, teachers, friends, and society—was never meant to lead you to your joy? What if the only real way to find true bliss is to step off the well-worn road and carve your own?

Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist behind The Hero with a Thousand Faces, put it beautifully:

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

I’ve always been a Road Less Traveled kind of girl. But it wasn’t until midlife that I realized there’s immense power in carving your own path—the liberation and lightness of being that comes from stepping off the expected road and leaping into the unknown.

Because here’s the thing: Following someone else’s path is easy. It’s familiar. Comfortable. Safe.

But true freedom? True bliss? That lives in the wilderness smack dab in the world of uncertainty. It’s the space where you don’t know what’s coming next but you continue forging ahead.

For many of us, that awakening begins right around midlife. We start to question everything we’ve been taught. When the “should’s” and “must’s” and “have-to’s” no longer make sense. It’s when we realize the life we’re living may not be the one we were meant to live.

That’s the beginning of what Campbell called The Hero’s Journey.

I prefer to call it The Heroine’s Journey, because women are the ultimate protagonists—balancing careers, relationships, families, loss, empathy, reinvention, aging, healing, and everything in between.

Be forewarned: carving your own path isn’t easy. The best things in life take grit, grace, and a whole lot of gumption. They require feeling the fear—and doing it anyway. It’s about learning to dance with uncertainty, to walk into the unknown without a map, trusting that with each step, the path will appear.

So how do you begin? How do you start following your bliss when you’re not sure what it looks like?

Here are three simple, powerful ways to start:

1. Get Curious About What Lights You Up

Get quiet and ask yourself: When do I feel most alive? What puts me into flow and makes me lose track of time? Bliss leaves breadcrumbs—follow them.

2. Release the Need for Approval

Your path isn’t up for a vote. The Heroine’s Journey is an inside job. Trust your own voice over the noise of others.

3. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

The path won’t always be clear. You’ll stumble, doubt, and face fear. That’s not a sign to turn back—it’s a sign to forge your own way.

4. Take That First Step

Be the Explorer. Enter the Unknown. Be brave and begin right where you are. The first step is the hardest one. The second step follows the first as each one becomes easier! And, somewhere along your Heroine’s journey … your path, your true north, will become clear.

Your bliss isn’t awaiting you on someone else’s path. It’s waiting within you—one brave, beautiful, bold step at a time.