The wildness in us

Letting go of people-pleasing to embrace & express the true self

My dear friend—

I’ve missed it here! The past couple months I have neglected writing letters because I’ve been adjusting to a new job, moving to a new apartment in a still-new city, and trying to figure out how I want to spend the rest of the year. Lots of changes happening! (Not to mention dealing with the flea infestation…I don’t wanna talk about it.)

Not-writing has been taking a toll, but books have proved a good way to fill some of that void; I am still reading Women Who Run With the Wolves (which I will probably reference for months to come, you’ve been warned) and it is influencing much of what I think about in terms of my creative practice and reconnecting to the “wildness” of my soul. As an eldest daughter, I’ve taken on the typical disease of too-seriousness, too-niceness, the classic, overdone case of people-pleaser. But I have long been ready for a complete overhaul of this “personality” that I’ve adopted to placate others, and Dr. Estes has been a crucial guide in realizing the universality of this affliction, and also how it affects the creative process.

Speaking plainly: I’ve spent far too long forsaking my true self to be a more palatable, watered-down, normalized version of who I was as a child. The solution? Finally getting serious about my creative practice, of course. What else has been my thesis of life for the past year if not the idea that a solid yet playful creative practice is the ultimate way to channel a connection to something divine, or at least to feel divine, to come into contact with that unmistakable knowing of purpose, of conviction, of love? Well, it’s about time I stop theorizing about this “thesis” and actually start living it.

Spending a month away from my creative projects, I see now more than ever that when I stop writing, I stop listening to myself. It is my way of parsing through what I observe, how I feel, and coming to a conclusion on what I think. Without it, my thoughts jumble so that I can only see the start of an idea until it fades somewhere in the middle, interrupted by another. My brain is mimicking what it’s like to scroll on social media, inundated with lots of interesting little tidbits but not absorbing much, not enough to form genuine opinions on said tidbits. A scary thought.

And so for me, the eldest daughter who spent much of my life masquerading as the opinion-less, the avoider of decision-making and conflict-resolving, too ready to say phrases like “We can do whatever you’d like” and “I don’t mind either way,” losing sight of myself usually means I’m adopting stray feelings and thoughts as if I’m an empty, hungry energy vampire.

It always happens like this—I allow the outside world to take precedence over my inner world, and the latter suffers. This cycle can only end when I become aware of it.

It is a good reminder that we have the ability to choose a way of being that supports how we want to feel. First, identify how you want to feel. Then, explore different activities that help elicit that feeling.

I want to feel alive, connected to self, fully expressed, playful, curious. To arrive here, I know I must:

• find a creative way to express myself every day

• nourish my body with good food

• enrich my mind with good media

• spend time in nature

• …the list expands and expands.

What I’m “learning” right now seems like basic, common sense, but it is putting it into practice that doesn’t come naturally to most of us anymore. I blame the usual suspects: capitalism, colonization, modern western society as a whole.

But now that I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to feel connected to myself through my art…not being in that state honestly just feels like a big waste of time. I can feel something within me waiting to be activated, ready to expand, to express, and allow my soul to shine up through my ego and out into the world. This is my most important mission of the year: to learn how to fully be myself, to not compartmentalize my personality based on what environment I’m in, to take my creative work incredibly seriously but to be deeply unserious about everything else, and to move through life with the curiosity and playfulness of my child self.

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Dr. Estes tells the story of a lonely man who goes out to sea and finds a group of ethereal, dancing women. They are known to transform into mythical seals and spend eternal lives under the sea. Their seal-skins lie on the rocks beside them, and he steals one of them and blackmails its wearer into marrying him on land before he will give her seal-skin back, which prevents her from living where she belongs—in the depths of the ocean. Years later, they have a child, and although she loves him she begins to wither away, longing to return to the sea, but her husband denies her. Finally, her child helps her back into her seal-skin and she must sacrifice a life with him to be back under the sea in her natural state.

The story warns against the dangers of abandoning one’s nature—such as our common abandoning of childhood fascinations in lieu of being a functioning member of society. The ego (the lonely man) entices us into safety, practicality, and social norms, abandoning our inner magic. This suppression is the ego’s way of keeping us safe, but it is only with a healthy relationship between ego and soul that we can live in alignment with who we are meant to be. To return back to our wildness, we must birth, or create, something which serves as a portal to our true selves.

I had a thought right before I fell asleep last night: what if I just embraced my inner wildness, that potion-making, tree-climbing, easily excitable, crazy woman I know is inside of me? What if I showed her to the world? Do I even know how to be her anymore, or is she lost in the short vignettes I remember from when I was a kid? And yet, somehow I know that writing is an access point into the deepest parts of me, where maybe she can be found.

Remember this: your art, your weird obsessions, your favorite ways to play, whatever it is that connects you back to yourself, is your lifeline. It is the home that you must learn to return to over and over again. You must not spend too many days at a time taking it for granted, as it is a muscle that needs maintenance or else it becomes strenuous to carry what used to be light.

I want to hear about your wildness! Feel free to reply back to this email with whatever thoughts you have <3

-hanna