“I love reading. School has always been easy. But I started using and drinking when I was 14, and from that point on, my life just kind of took a different turn. The first time I was at the U was in 2003. I got my student loan money and I went and spent the money on an eight-ball of cocaine. So I ended up dropping out. I failed out. I didn’t even withdraw. I just stopped coming and I’m still paying student loans for that.

Eventually it got pretty bad. I was using intravenous drugs, meth and heroin. I have more than 20 misdemeanors in Utah and two felonies. At a certain point, I had four warrants for my arrest in four different states. So that’s pretty good. Even in the big 12-step meetings, people will brag about having two warrants at a time. I’m like, I had four in four states. I think my criminal history is probably my most storied body of work.

After I got sober, I kind of got bit by that bug to write again. I started reading Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. I started writing an essay and the essay eventually grew to a book, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, published by Chiron. What I’m most interested in recently is, I kind of went back to my roots and started studying ancient Greek again. I started looking at Homer.

There’s a specific phrase that I love that Homer uses that only applies to mortals: tetlēoti thūmōi. What that means is ‘with a soul having endured.’ What I discovered is that what we mortals endure, it becomes our value. In my theory, the thing that creates the value is our impermanence—the fact that what we love we will lose, and that we’re powerless to do anything about it. Underlying the whole thing is a deep sense of uncertainty. Because as mortals we endure those things, we end up with these structures of value.

I’m going to start grad school next year. I’m going to become a clinical counselor to try to help people maybe discover their value. In my writing I get to have these conversations with the people who are my heroes—Carl Jung, James Hillman, Joseph Campbell. My Homer essay, “The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel,” came out in Jung Journal. I love blind peer review because they don’t know that I have more than 20 misdemeanors and two felonies and that I dropped out of high school. That’s not the person they’re reading. For all they know, Joseph Campbell came back from the dead and wrote this essay. It’s letting the work stand on its own two feet.”

— Cody Peterson, psychology student