I fucking love you, and what I most love about you is the unvarnished, the raw, everything you have done your best to hide.

I want to know where the wild lives in you. Where is the ungovernable, the untamed, the inextinguishable? Whatever it is in you that refuses to perform, or to be commodified? Whatever it is in you that howls and keens, and that longs for silence?

And what is it that keeps your wild, untamed self trapped, obscured, bound, domesticated? When were you neutered, neutralised, de-clawed, de-fanged? Perhaps it happened before you can remember being yourself, or maybe it came in when you were a bright-eyed six year old, or a spunky twelve year old, or some other time when you learnt – abruptly, cruelly – that being yourself was not alright?

At some time, an external something – call it conditioning, abuse, colonisation, shaming – came in, and its message was clear: you cannot be this. This is too much, or not enough; this is wrong, or defective. You need to do everything in your power to turn this into something else, something more acceptable or agreeable or less or more or different, or else… Or else you will be belittled, humiliated, punished, tortured, tormented, bullied, criticised, shunned.

And over the years, under more or less relentless pressure to be something else, your aliveness, your miraculous you-ness, went to ground, took refuge within, disguised itself, attempted to extinguish itself, betrayed itself, sold itself out, all so that you could survive. It started to seem as if you had lost it forever, as if you were destined to live outside of yourself for the rest of your life. Occasionally, usually when you were by yourself, you’d get the scent of it, catch the flavour of it. Sometimes, that was divine; at other times, utterly terrifying.

But one day, you come to a place (if you haven’t already) where it seems like you are either going to die, go mad, fall apart or begin to unearth your precious aliveness (most likely all of it at once). Your heart begins to race, your mind is in chaos, your body sobs and shakes, and you have no idea how to begin, yet something in your cells begins to move. A different way of seeing-sensing-knowing starts to take shape.

You begin to see those moments in which hurt, absence, invisibility, or some other blow shaped you; moments in which you were hardened, or twisted, or diminished, or contorted, and made to feel less than your magnificent self. Moments in which you had to escape or hide, numb or defend; moments in which your cries were stifled, your rage forbidden, your grief unnoticed or mocked.

So slowly, painstakingly, you begin to uncover what lives in your marrow. Slowly, so painfully, you begin to break through the walls of self-hatred and self-criticism, not by hating them or criticising them, but by seeing them for what they are – the external masquerading as the internal, and not your creation in the first place. You find yourself saying things like, this isn’t mine, or no wonder I feel like this. You stop buying into the narratives that you must do something about yourself, that you should try to be something other than this; that you should be more peaceful, calmer, less heartbroken or traumatised or enraged or sensitive. You begin to question the ‘answers’ proffered by religion, spirituality, therapy, and to sense the violations so often inherent in them.

Over the years, you discover a space in which you can be however you are. A space in which there is no shaming, no idea that you should be anything other than this. Not as some kind of favour, but because this space wants nothing less than all of you. Every last bit, including everything that you’ve ever hidden or tried to destroy or exile. It wants you to know the entirety of yourself, without exclusion, condition or exception. And it is here that you begin to love yourself fiercely, and where you are taught how to weather the backlash that inevitably comes when we dare to step beyond the confines of empire.

Slowly, you turn towards your untamedness. You attune to its cyclic, rhythmic nature, its expansions and contractions. Judgements that emanate from the world of linearity or polarity fall away. You no longer believe that there is something innately wrong with you. You realise that what you long for is to be more yourself, more this – a stark contrast to all those years when you thought you wanted to be less this, when you would have given anything to be that.

Slowly, as the walls fall and the love seeps in, you begin to take a stand for yourself. You hear yourself (or something that very decidedly loves you) saying things like, There is absolutely no shame in feeling this. It feels like sanity, clarity and perspective are back, but they are nothing like the desiccated, rigid rationality or ‘logic’ that you were taught were the province of the reasonable.

Over time, everything you had taken to be the case gets turned on its head. What you’d mistaken for maturity turns out to be immaturity or inhumanity. What you’d thought was wisdom is actually delusion or folly or naivety. The people who you thought had it down, who you were convinced were better than you, calmer or more peaceful than you, more healed than you – well, they’re often revealed to be nothing of the sort.

No longer cut off from your body, or its miraculousness, or its knowing, you now trust what’s emerging, even if it makes no immediate sense, even if you don’t know where it’ll go, even if you have no way of understanding what’s coming. You become familiar with ancient time, the deep time of trees and rocks and oceans, far removed from the urgency created by capitalism, imperialism, narcissism. You are open to the myriad ways in which the past makes itself known; you know that what’s coming through you might be personal, ancestral, collective or a combination of all three, and more.

You are more open to pain and suffering than you’ve ever been. You feel more intensely than you have ever done, and yet you are beyond grateful to be brought to your knees. You mourn the state of the world, and yet you love being here. In fact, you love being alive with every fibre of your being, and even though there are times when it feels like you can’t take any more, and hardening is your only option, somehow your heart expands a little bit more, and you know without doubt that you are here to be yourself, wild and untamed.