Back when I got serious about writing, I joined the throngs of Freshmen English majors and PBS nerds who were very, very into a man named Joseph Campbell. If you’re not in either of those groups, Campbell was a writer and professor of comparative mythology who devised, among other things, the concept of the “monomyth.” He believed that, at the end of the day, humans only ever tell one story, what he called “the Hero’s Journey”, and it always follows a familiar template. Full disclosure: many modern folklorists dismiss Campbell as an amateur and an overgeneralizer, and I’m certain there’s some truth to that. But I’m more poet than social scientist and so I’m inclined to find the bits of his work that give meaning to my life and admit that the rest may be junk science.

Campbell said that, when a person steps out on a transformative journey, there are certain stages, beginning with the Call to Adventure. One day, we’re shuffling along, minding our business and doing life as we usually do and then suddenly, something is just off. Maybe we’ve outgrown something–”I just can’t do this job another day”--or maybe a belief system has shifted–”I can no longer believe in the God of my youth”--but either way, what once worked for us no longer does. And often, Campbell tells us, the gods help shake us up and send us off by taking the form of what’s called the Herald.

The Herald is the one who eyes us up and down, stuffed as we are into our too-tight belief systems and self-concepts, and says, “Girl, you need to size up.” This is Gandalf rolling up into the Shire, letting Frodo know that it’s time for him to assemble his posse and hit the road to Sauron. This is Rafiki, finding Simba in the jungle to let him know his carefree days singing with Nathan Lane and the warthog are over and there will be worries. This is the sick old man, really a god in disguise, who appears to the young Buddha on what was supposed to be a sunny, idyllic trip to the park, cluing him into the truth that there was suffering beyond the palace walls.

Joseph Campbell says that the Herald is often a little bit–and I’m sure he meant this in the nicest possible way–grotesque. Often, the Herald is sent from the underworld, and looks it. He–or she–is often, in the words of Joe Campbell, “dark, loathly or terrifying, judged evil by the world.” Or! Even better! The Herald might show up as a straight up beast–the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland or the stag that appeared to King Arthur–representing our own wild, untapped sexuality. All of this makes me giggle because my Herald appeared in the form of a very sweet psychic named Dee Patterson, who used one of those mall glamor shots as her profile picture and still mailed out cassette recordings of her readings.

I’d called Dee during one of the off-again periods with Azu, when I’d felt completely crazy and hopeless and desperate for answers. It hadn’t been the first time. In my early twenties, also feeling crazy and hopeless and desperate for answers, but about work, I’d stumbled into her office one day and found that she was actually pretty legit. She’d asked me if I was a writer on my first visit, and knew that I was desperate to travel, and had once had a vision of me on a stairmaster that had come true (for whatever that was worth). I hadn’t reached out to her in years but I was desperate for some hit of hope.

“Is there a guy in the picture?” she asked me. Across the phone line I could hear the shuffling of tarot cards, cups and kings and other things I wouldn’t have been able to decipher even if I’d seen them.

“There is,” I said back. A whimper.

A little more flipping and shuffling.

“Angela,” Dee said, “I’m not getting that he was the one.”

“Oh?” I said, though I don’t know why. I felt a heavy stone in my chest, but she hadn’t placed it there, so much as prodded it a little. I already knew this, hadn’t I? Azu wasn’t my husband.

“What I am seeing,” she said, “is that he was the one before the one.”

The stone shifted a little bit, not falling away but loosening. I was all ears.

“Someone else is coming.” She said. “And Azu was like a little wakeup call. He made you realize there’s someone out there for you. And it’s time.”

“Oh?” I said again, but somehow, I’d already known that, too.