Art by Seth Anderson
Are you living your best wild crazy meaningful life? Do you hold yourself back, wary of what people will think if you let your whole self fly? Do voices from the past haunt you and make you think you should be different than you are?
I can relate. My mother used to tell me, “You’ll never have any friends.” Frequently. She was a social climber whose main goal was to be seen as the attractive, talented, elegant woman she strove very hard to be. I was not thin and had very little interest in impressing people. At the time, I thought I was not attractive and didn’t especially care about that. We were mismatched.
On the other hand, I was interested in art, in science – a total nerdy introvert. Her statement was never true. I’ve always had great friends. But my child’s mind interpreted her view of me to mean that something was wrong with me that couldn’t be fixed.
I tried very hard to “fix” my intensity, my need to spend a lot of time alone, and my directness and nerdy interests. I was unsuccessful. I could not become someone else. And I am still learning to value who I am whether people like it or not. Some people value me as I am, and some don’t. But that’s true of all of us. A therapist I saw when I was 21 told me, “50% of people will like you, and 50% won’t. That’s just the way the world works. Get used to it.”
“And the key to reclaiming our original wholeness is not merely to suppress psychological symptoms, recover from addictions and trauma, manage stress, or refurbish dysfunctional relationships but to fully flesh out our multifaceted, wild psyches, committing ourselves to the largest story we’re capable of living, serving something bigger than ourselves.”
– Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche
“…committing ourselves to the largest story we’re capable of living, serving something bigger than ourselves.” That may scare the shit out of you. It has me. But it’s our true calling. Every one of us.
You are you. And that’s the beauty of your life. Only you can bring the gifts of who you are to this world. And the world needs you just the way you are.
Seedbop endorses a wild, crazy meaningful life. It’s not easy to live a wild life. We live in a culture that values conformity and wants us to be the vanilla version of ourselves.
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” -Howard Thurman
So how do we do that? Well, the path to comes with a lot of self-examination and self-knowledge. Just going wild without knowing who you are results in chaos. You need to do the ongoing work of accepting all of yourself and move forward with intentional wisdom.
Last summer, I started having very heavy emotions of intense fear, anxiety, and dread. I didn’t know where they were coming from. I was successful in my work. I had enough. I was making my dreams come true.
I spent hours just sitting with those emotions and finally understood. These emotions were finally surfacing from my childhood.
I do not remember feeling anything until I was 21. I do remember as a teenager working very hard to change my personality, but I don’t remember feeling anything. I intellectually knew that I must have suppressed those feelings out of self-preservation but could not access them.
Going on this journey into a painful past was excruciating at times. With the help of my therapist and coach, I have begun to reintegrate all the wonderful parts of who I was as a child. Intensely curious, insightful, observant, caring and, overly responsible, honest. I learned to love nature, geology, the universe of stars, botany, and horticulture from my father.
I also learned to be generous with love from my father. My father’s second wife had become pregnant by another man when he was in the military (WWII & the Korean War).
My sister Sunny was the result. Sunny always felt removed from the family and searched for her biological father. When she found him, he wouldn’t even open the screen door to let her in. She was devasted. My father said, “You don’t need to worry about him. I will always be your father.” Embracing the significant pains of life and extending love to them, I learned from my dad.
My mother, who was also my abuser, taught me professional sewing methods (to which I credit my engineering skills) and my love of art, music, and theater. Although I did not inherit her love of the social status she craved, I love the colors, the textures, and the sensations of all things creative. She had much more traditional tastes than I, and she planted all those seeds that grew the edgy, exotic wildflowers inside me.
By finally accessing all of who I was as a kid at my ripe old crone-ish age, I feel more radical (deeply rooted) and more at peace with my neurodiversity. I am making peace with the parts she rejected that are really the magic of who I am.
So I give this to you, do your deep work, and make peace with the parts of you that may have been rejected but are really the precious gifts you can extend to this world. Let’s move forward into the wildest life we can live.
“I’d rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it
than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.”
— Jack London (The Turtles of Tasman)
Next week – more about wildness
Interested in the steps to a creative life? Download The Seedbop Navigator: 9 Seedbop Habits: Move Past Fear and Stuckness, Become Wildly Creative, Unveil Your One-of-a-Kind Brilliance, Solve Big Problems, Persist Through the Hard Stuff, Flourish in Your Work and Life, Have Fun, Make Things Happen, and Make Your Heart Sing. (click here)
This is the guidebook that will point you in the direction of a more creative life. It’s free. I’m here to help. Walk with me on the seedbop journey. Let’s do this together.
