The Wild Within
I thought freedom came from leaving. It turned out to come from listening.
Last summer, I read Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The book came to me at a time when my life seemed to echo many of its themes. I started it in my tiny studio apartment in Paris and finished it lying in a hammock in the garden of a house I was renting in Sri Lanka.
At the time, I thought I was searching for a wilder environment. I wanted nature, slower days, and the sound of waves instead of traffic. Looking back, I can see I was searching for something much deeper.
I’ve always moved through life differently than those around me–happily divorced, single parent, choosing experiences over possessions, and living simply enough that my kids and I could travel often. Eventually, I sold nearly everything I owned, left what remained in a few plastic bins in my parents’ basement, and boarded a flight with nothing more than a carry-on suitcase. I believed freedom came from owning less, staying untethered, and being able to follow curiosity wherever it led.
From the outside, it looked as though I had figured it out.
But after years on the road, I began to feel strangely lost. Every place seemed to pull me toward another. My body carried a tension I couldn’t explain. I started walking more, practicing more yoga, and even looked into taking a dance class, convinced that movement itself might release whatever I was holding.
Only later did I realize that what I was searching for had little to do with geography.
Books have a way of giving us language for things we’ve felt but couldn’t yet name. Estés did exactly that.
Her Wild Woman isn’t wild in the way our culture imagines. She isn’t reckless or rebellious for rebellion’s sake. She’s our instinctual self–the deeply intuitive, creative part of us that knows what we need before logic catches up. Modern life teaches us to quiet that voice. We become so agreeable, productive, and accommodating that we gradually lose touch with the quieter wisdom underneath it all.
As I read, I realized that although I had let go of possessions, routines, and fixed addresses, I hadn’t let go of something more deeply rooted. I was free on the outside, but I still struggled to distinguish between what I genuinely wanted and what I believed I should want.
Looking back, I can see that this pattern shaped my relationships.
I softened–not dramatically, but in small, almost invisible ways. I became a little more accommodating, a little easier to fit into someone else’s life. No one asked me to do it outright, but somewhere along the way I’d learned to smooth my edges in the name of harmony.
Eventually, I would look around and barely recognize myself. Leaving those relationships never felt like searching for something new. It felt like setting down a weight I’d been carrying for far too long.
One of the ideas that stayed with me most from Women Who Run With the Wolves was its view of love.
Estés argues that healthy love nourishes rather than consumes. It encourages growth instead of demanding sacrifice. It allows each person to remain fully themselves, respects intuition, and makes honesty possible. Unhealthy love asks something very different. It asks us to abandon ourselves in order to preserve the relationship. It cages us.
Reading that, I realized my problem had never been relationships themselves. I had simply become so accustomed to softening that I no longer noticed I was doing it until I felt trapped.
Shortly after finishing the book, I came across the Atticus quote, Love her but leave her wild. It deeply resonated, and I instantly wanted to have it tattooed.
Then I talked myself out of it.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Instead, I chose a different tattoo—one that carried a similar sentiment but felt safer. Looking back, that decision tells me exactly where I was. The message resonated; I just wasn’t ready to wear it.
It would take another year of writing, questioning, and learning to trust my intuition before I finally understood what the book had really been asking of me. It wasn’t asking me to travel farther. It was asking me to stop editing myself.
A few weeks ago, I finally got the tattoo.
It isn’t a declaration that I’m somehow different. It’s an acknowledgment that I’m more myself than I ever have been.
In embracing that version of myself, I had begun to accept that finding a partner might not be in the cards for me. The relationships I’d experienced eventually asked me to become a version of myself that felt smaller than the one I knew myself to be. I was done making myself small and had come to believe that freedom and partnership might simply be incompatible.
Then, on my first day back in Antigua, as I unpacked my suitcase and settled into a place I felt I had been led back to, I received a message from someone asking if I’d like to grab a coffee once he arrived. Messages like that aren’t unusual among people who travel full-time.
What followed was.
The conversation continued with such ease that months later neither of us can explain how it unfolded. It simply felt different from the beginning.
What has surprised me most isn’t the connection itself. It’s that I haven’t felt the need to soften myself. If anything, I’ve felt encouraged to become more fully who I already am. When old habits surface, he reminds me that he doesn’t want the edited version of me. He wants the real one–the curious, passionate, messy woman who changes countries, changes ideas, and continues to grow into herself.
For years, I assumed becoming more authentic would make partnership less likely. Instead, it challenged that assumption entirely.
Maybe that’s what Estés was trying to teach all along. The Wild Woman doesn’t reject relationships; she rejects anything that asks her to abandon herself in order to belong.
For a long time, I believed freedom meant traveling lightly, owning less, and keeping the world open before me. Those things gave me an extraordinary life, but they weren’t the whole story. The harder work has been trusting my instincts enough to stop editing myself to fit someone else’s expectations.
Perhaps that’s what it really means to remain wild.
You've named something so real: that the freedom you were chasing was never geographic. You'd let go of possessions and addresses and still kept editing yourself to fit others — and the true work was there, not on any map.
My own road worked on me in another way. Leaving my country, I thought I knew the world; the more I traveled, the less it stayed the same — how I saw it, and what I saw of myself. It rewrote me, one country at a time.
I really appreciated this. What stayed with me was the difference between being free on the outside and being free enough inside yourself to stop editing who you are.
The travel, the carry-on suitcase, the plastic bins in your parents’ basement, Paris, Sri Lanka, Antigua, all gave the piece movement. But the deeper movement seemed to be quieter: noticing where you had softened yourself, where you had become easier to fit into someone else’s life, and where that started to feel like a kind of cage.
I especially liked the way the tattoo returned later in the piece. At first, the words felt true but not safe enough to wear. By the end, they became less like a declaration and more like evidence that you had stopped asking permission to be fully yourself.