the wild year

a reflection on the journey of 2025

I set out with the intention of rewilding myself. The year before, I’d read Women Who Run With Wolves, and the way that it took hold of me left a need to pursue this idea of rewilding.

It was well into the months of this year when I realized there was an entire movement of people rewilding themselves in ways that I had no intention of doing. These were things like gathering up roadkill, learning to skin it, and saving the meat. While I read many personal essay stories of women who did this, and were thriving in this new (old?) way of life, I was not on that particular path. While I was willing to consider their advice for things like foraging and mushroom/berry guidance, I realized that my path was along the spiritual/emotional journey.

Growing up in an early childhood oppressive home of deep manipulation, abuse, and control shaped me in odd ways. I had a mother who would never find me acceptable or a reason to be proud. This created in me a why bother mentality, which clung to my growing body like a wetsuit until I was a teen. When I was twelve, I was placed in a religious group home and, let’s just say, it was similar in completely different ways. High control and manipulation were still the themes of the game, though their methodology resulted in a deep fear of failure, known core-irrelevance, and the risk of spending my afterlife in eternal damnation… So yeah, then I learned to try, excel, and achieve. The problem, however, was that I was this newly adult young woman with no real education, no family, no money, and no idea how to function outside of high-control environments, and wasn’t exactly in touch with her nature at all.

This continued for years… I chased the love of a God who was painted by the pulpits of men who always seemed to be after something other than community, wholeness, or healing. When I would seek counseling (From them, of course, because that’s all that was allowed), I would get advice that made me more irrelevant and therefore less (and less) interested in living much longer.

At one point, I’d had an entire section of the sexual abuse healing ministry of a church placed under me. I was told that it was up to me to mentor the three other women who were in desperate need of healing, and since therapy was too dangerous, I would have to lean on the Holy Spirit to walk this path with them. The youngest of the three women was thirty-eight.

I was twenty-one.

I believed I should feel honored, and that, combined with the fact that my “healthy” strategies involved a lot of compartmentalization and ignoring triggers, it was all a terrible idea. Looking back now, decades later, I am mortified. The damaged girl (whose brain wasn’t even fully formed yet) felt validated for the first time in this life, and that led to even more trauma. Even beyond that experience for me, I can now imagine how belittling and horrifying it must have been for those women… they allowed vulnerability to seek help and were handed over to a child.

When I was twenty-four, I went camping with a bunch of coworkers, and they convinced me to go skinny dipping in the river, under the full moon. I was terrified. The very tight grip of control I’d learned to keep on my life* did not allow such foolishness as this. Thankfully, peer pressure won over, and I jumped in. I will never forget the way that water felt on my flesh, how brightly that beautiful moon shone…