Why Me? Or What Is This For?

Title and Subtitle

Why Me? Or What Is This For?

Crisis, Borrowed Rules, Solitude, and the Making of a Self

A Research Course

Vita Harwood

Series "In Twelve Evenings" BOOK 45

What Do I Already Know About This?

Test your knowledge!

Why me?

Sooner or later almost everyone asks it. After an illness, a divorce, a layoff, a betrayal, a loss, or simply after years of a life that didn't turn out the way you meant it to. The question looks backward, toward causes, and it often goes around in circles without ever finding an answer.

This book offers you a second question: What is this for? It isn't a question to fate, and it isn't a hunt for a hidden plan behind your misfortune. It is a question to yourself: what will I do with what happened, and who will I be when I come out the other side?

Why Me? Or What Is This For? is a course of sixteen lessons for thoughtful adults, one lesson an evening. It follows the road that myths call the hero's journey and psychology calls the making of a self: life by other people's rules, the call to change and the urge to refuse it, the meeting with your own shadow, crisis, loneliness, mortality, midlife, and the hardest part of all, the return to the people you love.

Each lesson brings research, primary sources, and great literature to the same table. Job and Gilgamesh, Ivan Ilyich and Peer Gynt, Jonah and Frankenstein's creature sit beside Viktor Frankl, Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Solomon Asch, and the scientists who study regret, loneliness, memory, and forgiveness.