Cultivating Wild
When I was a child, I was a good girl, a rule follower, in truth, a full-on goodie two shoes. I don’t know that I would have opted in for that role given the full array of choices. But, I was the second of two children, and my sister, Stephanie, had already claimed the bad girl by the time I arrived and got my wits about me. And because early childhood and adolescence is a time of differentiation and black-and-white thinking, I chose the opposite path from Stephanie at almost every turn. The better path. The right path. And, I was rewarded for it. I also conjured a lot of judgment about my sister and the manifestations of her misbehavior.
In my teen years, the pressure of being that good began to weigh on me. I was resentful of the expectations while at the same time being addicted to the attention and accolades that the good part of me garnered. When my sister moved out of the house, it seemed to free up some space, some latitude for me to take up some of the role that she had held.
I became wild.
But not for all to see. It was an undercover kind of wild that allowed me to preserve my good girl image while dabbling in the teenage debauchery that I had looked on with so much judgment before. And, I still did. I was engaging in the behavior, all the while feeling shameful about it, wanting to cover it up.
I spent much of the second half of my teenage years playing two very different roles, but only one that I wanted to illuminate on the stage. Because while I madly needed this other part of me, the bad side, to manifest in some way, I was incredibly ashamed of it, of me. Holding both—the part that stepped proudly into the spotlight, and the part that engaged in wild behavior when the theater was dark—was too much for me to bear.
Perhaps it was the shame of doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons in the shadows. Or maybe it was the pain of that shame held up against the glory of being good. Whatever it was, the result was that my wildness was banished, locked away with the unused props and threadbare costumes.
In the meantime, my sister kept living into the role she had claimed at the beginning of her life and would hold until its end. And in her final handful of years, I began to appreciate it in her…not, I thought, as something I wanted for me, but as an aspect of her identity and personality that was not good or bad, but just was.
Stephanie’s life was short, but it was not small. When Stephanie died in 2022, I felt deeply the loss of her spirit in this world – her childlike joy, her unabashed claim to a life fully lived, her wildness. As I intentionally opened up space for those parts of her to take root in me, I realized that some had been within me all along, just locked away.
So this summer, I unlocked the door that had constrained my wildness, and I invited it into the light…intentionally.
I welcomed it into the scenes of my husband’s and my weeklong stay-at-home camp while both of our children were at sleep-away camp (…at the same time for the first time ever!). We felt free to reprise our roles as singletons who became a duo, visiting our old haunts, trying out new ones, staying out late, moving to our own internal schedule. That week, this song became our anthem…and it remains so now whenever we need to conjure into the present the wildness of who we were then and who we still want to be.
I brought Wild with me to a wine country getaway with girlfriends of more than two decades. When we asked the wine pourer to take a group photo and he mentioned standing on top of the table in the tasting room as one of our backdrop options, I giggled and was about to make the safer choice. And then Wild stepped in…and up…onto the table top! The next day, Wild reprised her role on a different table top at a different winery and I reveled in the freedom and joy of her.
Wild came along on a family trip to my origin state of Tennessee when I saw sparklers for sale at the local market and insisted against my safety-oriented husband’s protests that we buy them so our kiddos could experience their wonder (these are not legal in California, my home now). Wild led the way on our dusk-turning-to-night searches for fireflies, another treasure of my childhood that my children had never before encountered. Wild was the first (adult) to jump into the murky lake to investigate the turtle who had slipped in from atop a log. Wild raised her hand to try water skiing for the first time since my unsuccessful attempt at the age of 10. My children didn’t know about my quest for Wild, but weeks after our return home, my 13-year-old son said to me, “Mom, you’ve been a lot more fun lately.”
I had a suspicion that cultivating Wild would enrich not just my personal relationships but how I brought myself to my professional space…freer, more open, more willing to step into the unknown when my first instinct is to assume the safer, more standard pose. Wild has been with me since, as I share my intentional exploration and casting of her with those who I have worked for some time and those who I am just encountering. She’s informing the places I step into and how I am stepping into them, and also how I invite others into and hold this space.
An exploration of fallback as a reality—indeed an unavoidable and (I would argue) vital aspect of our development—necessitates that we not only look forward, but that we also give attention to what came before. And, in that process, we often discover that there are parts of us that have been covered up, banished, because we were ashamed of them, because others deemed them bad, because they just weren’t ideally fit for purpose in their original form, at that time.
Yet, it is often these very same characters in a more mature form that we need most as we venture into what lies ahead. Sometimes, it’s the youthful exuberance of these characters, the rawness that existed before we, and others, and societal expectations molded them into a form that is presentable, but not always true and free, that may hold the missing key for us as we attempt to live into our intentions.
As I’ve sat with Wild—she on one side of the locked door inside my developmental house, me on the other; then invited her to sit with me and remind me of her appearances in the early scenes of my life; then asked her to dance with me in the scenes of my now—I’ve realized that Robbin modeled this welcoming in of an banished character for me years prior…as he invited his own exiled character, the Dream Warrior, back into his life, onto his own stage.
In Fallbook, Robbin reflected,
“So much of my own maturation process has relied on banishing. And there are violent consequences to that. …I had believed that in order to move out of the pain of the earlier, less-complex phases of my life, I needed to grow up and be something else. Banish him. Set him aside. But it all seems too extreme. Perhaps this is what growth is, this messy process. And if you want those pieces back, you have to go get them when you're capable of handling them.
…I feel a curiosity to welcome in parts of myself that I would have shunned because of the expectation that I show up as my highest or most evolved self all of the time. Self-Sovereign me will bring things to the table, will bring me to the table, and participate in ways that a Socialized or a Self-Authoring me decidedly will not. And some of those ways are perfectly delightful.”
Leaving the Ghost Light Burning: Illuminating Fallback in Embrace of the Fullness of You, pp. 132-134
At the time, I observed Robbin inviting this character in, integrating him into his current ensemble, without realizing that Wild was my own locked away Dream Warrior…or even remembering that she existed. And, now that I have, I realize that Robbin is right.
Wild is perfectly delightful.
