Your Inner Wild Doesn’t Cost $3,000
They’re selling wild woman retreats to women our age. Nobody took your wild. You got talked out of it little by little.
Somebody is selling you back the one thing you already own.
Wild woman retreats up in the mountains. Six-month group programs. Festivals with sold-out tickets and a packing list.
All of it aimed at women our age, all of it promising to help you find the part of yourself that went quiet somewhere around 1998.
I clicked on one. I read the whole page.
UGH! I was looking and hoping they were gonna give me some kind of information that I could use to tap into the person or the trait that I know is there deep down inside of me. And all it was, was a sales pitch.
Nothing got lost
Here’s what I actually think happened, and maybe I’m wrong, but this is how it looks from where I sit.
Nobody took your wild. It didn’t go anywhere. You got talked out of it little by little.
And not by anybody in particular, just by every reasonable decision you made for about twenty-five years.
You ate at six because that’s when everybody ate. You wore what wouldn’t get a comment. You said yes when the real answer was no, because no meant a whole conversation and gosh, you were tired.
Not one of those was wrong. I’d have made most of them too.
But you made about four thousand of them and somewhere in the middle of it you went from being a woman with preferences to a woman with a schedule.
That’s not a wound. You don’t need six months and a facilitator for that. You need to start making a couple of different small decisions, and you can start one this week.
And this is how I did it
In November of 2018 I found a shuttle bus. I bought it that December.
I’d been chewing on it for months before that. My pickup and my camper were pretty much dead in the water, one leaked and one was rusted out, so I knew something had to change.
I went with a shuttle bus because they’re easier to drive and they’re more square inside. That was pretty much the whole reason.
But here’s the part I actually want you to have.
I couldn’t just walk in and announce it. I had breakfast with my dad every week, and I knew if I sat down and said hey, I’m buying a bus, that was gonna go badly. So I didn’t. I gave him one sentence a week.
One week it was, you know, I don’t think I’m gonna find a camper, they cost a lot of money. Next week, oh, I saw somebody who did a shuttle bus, that sounds nice.
Then, if I did a shuttle bus I could make it the way I want it. Then, oh, I found somebody who could do the work.
Little by little for a couple of months. And by the time I told him I might pull the trigger on one I’d seen down the road, he wasn’t surprised.
He still wasn’t happy about it. But he wasn’t in shock either, and I did it anyway.
That’s what wild actually looked like for me. Not a weekend in the mountains with thirty women I don’t know. A bus, a breakfast, and about eight sentences spread out over two months.
And it cost me nothing to start. The deciding part was free. The deciding part is always free.
I’m still not totally sure what the difference is between fear and confidence, honestly. Maybe one day I oughta sit down and figure that out.
But I know the wild part isn’t something you buy back. It’s something you quit apologizing for.
Before you go, sit with these for a minute. Don’t write anything down. Just answer them in your own head.
When was the last time you did something nobody knew about, and nobody had an opinion on?
What’s one small thing you used to do before you had people to answer to? Not a big thing. A small dumb one.
Who in your life would you have to prep, little by little, before you did the thing you actually want to do? And what’s the first sentence?
And here’s the one I’d sit with the longest. Who exactly are you still behaving for?
