Rites of Passage and the Courage to Rewrite Your Story
Transforming the Identities that No Longer Serve Us
Some truths do not arrive gently. They hover at the edge of our vision, patient and insistent, waiting for the moment we can no longer look away. Growing up is one such truth. So is the realization that a substance (alcohol, drugs, etc.), once chosen freely, has begun to choose us instead. In both moments, awareness precedes acceptance, and denial becomes a temporary refuge.
Mythologist, Sharon Blackie writes that the heroine’s journey begins with dislocation—a sense that our old identity no longer fits. “White Deer: Rites of Passage” was born from this space where the soul knows what the mind refuses. The white deer embodies the moment when avoidance fractures, calling the self toward a transformation that is emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
The poem opens in a dream like state...
“I awoke, but my eyes were sleeping…”
Truth rarely announces itself in full daylight. It drifts in. The “ghost white deer” steps forward as an omen, marking the end of innocence. Blackie describes this as the necessary rupture of the heroine’s path. Childhood fades. Illusions crack. What once felt eternal reveals itself as temporary. Once seen, this threshold cannot be crossed back over. Whether the truth is the end of childhood, or the presence of addiction, the soul has crossed a boundary.
Many times the next response is refusal.
“This looming fate was much too near / I have no wish to face this fear.”
Blackie reminds us that the heroine may resist transformation. Avoiding adulthood and denying addiction both arise from the same fear: that identity will be stripped away. When the voice cries,
“Growing old is not for me,”
it speaks for every truth we flee. This is the flight stage—the instinct to outrun becoming. Innocence, after all, is seductive. In the poem its revealed as “a mystic trance” because it softens reality, blurs consequence, and wraps us in the illusion of safety. Childhood promises protection; denial promises mastery. Yet the deer speaks what Blackie teaches again and again: the adversary is not external—it is internal.
“I am you and you are me / This mortal dress of reality.”
Psychotherapist, Dr. Nicki Monti, shares that the story we carry about ourselves becomes the world we inhabit. The narratives we repeat—of fear, limitation, and avoidance—shape the life we live until we consciously rewrite them. If we do not tell a different story, she says, we continue to enact the old one, carrying the beliefs of the past into our present and future.
Many of us grew up with the belief that youth was a sanctuary, that denial was a shelter. Monti emphasizes that spiritual transformation requires more than wishing for a new ending; it demands choosing, speaking, and living a new story again and again, even while the old one still clings.
In the hall of antlers, inhabited by witnesses and wisdom, our heroine learns that fear can become a teacher, avoidance a bridge, and courage a natural extension of our confidence. Initiation is a door to spiritual growth.
The initiation begins when the new story is claimed. Blackie teaches that the heroine’s wisdom is earned through surrender, not conquest, through attunement to body, place, and ancestral knowing.
When the girl is exhausted, kneeling within the temple, an imposing White Deer approached her. Its intentions are unkown. Soon it became clear that this mysterious and ethereal creature stood not as a threat or a judge, but as a mirror and guide.
“Truth unveiled my inner light,”
We are reminded of the empowerment that is hidden beneath our fears. Our new story is to align with the soul’s call. Allow transformation to unfold, and unfold, and unfold...
“I am change that’s still becoming.”
This is the quiet truth of adulthood, of recovery, of spiritual awakening. Fear might remain, but its grip has loosened. Monti’s and Blackie’s philosophy converge here: the rewriting of our story fuels the deep work of integration, strengthening a new narrative.
At last comes the return—not to innocence, but to sovereignty.
“Girl and woman reconciled… I am Sovereign, Eternal, Free.”
The story I told myself no longer controls me; I now step fully into the story I choose to live.
White Deer: Rites of Passage” affirms that when we stop running from truth—whether the truth of age, of addiction, or of our inner voice—we step into the full possibility of who we have always been, as well as who we are becoming. The story we tell ourselves becomes a life aligned with courage, love, and authenticity.