Soft & Wild

I was born on the Autumnal Equinox and the first day of Libra in 1986, which means that as of yesterday morning, I am thirty-nine years old. Thirty-nine, in case you didn’t know, is the last number that comes before forty. I started calling myself middle-aged when I turned thirty-seven, partially as a joke, and partially to get ahead of everyone else and reclaim the term for myself, to shape it into something that actually described my experience, before society started hurling it at me as an insult.

Whenever I say I’m middle-aged, the default response most people have is to very quickly say, “Oh, no you’re not, you’re still young!”, which is sweet, but also untrue. I am still the youngest I’ll ever be, sure, and I’ve lived enough life at this point to not take that for granted, but I’m also reaching a point where I’m beginning to understand why people have mid-life crises. Whether it’s biological, or just placed on us by society, this time in life is a midpoint, where you can look back on past years and observe all of your successes and mistakes, and then look forward and realize you might not have as much time left as has already passed. I don’t think anyone can deny that that’s kinda scary.

I haven’t hit a crisis point, per se, but I have been going through what I’ve been describing as a “mid-life moment”, where lots of reflection is taking place. It’s a gentle reckoning of sorts, taking honest stock of what I’ve accomplished up to this point versus what I might have thought my life would look like at this point. The good news is that I’m actually incredibly happy with the winding path I have taken. I live in a place I love, full of many people I love. I have a whole second home only 1,000 miles away full of friends and family that I love as well. I do work I enjoy, I’m building a career, and I travel spontaneously and often. I’m not tied down, and have as much freedom and flexibility as my little wanderer heart desires. It’s an incredibly good life.

That bad news is that there is so, so, so much more I want to do before my time on earth is up.

I know, I know, that could be seen as a good thing too. Being constantly curious and wanting to be on the move means that my days are rarely boring, and the likelihood of me experiencing as much of this world as possible is high. But seeing it all is impossible, and the older I get, the more that reality looms. It’s something I’m striving, on a daily basis, to practice radical acceptance about, because it’s not a reality I can change. We are finite, and so is our time, and that’s just the way it is, so with that knowledge, how can I live the most beautiful, expansive life possible? That is what I hope to spend the rest of my days discovering.

I haven’t written as much in the last handful of years, partially because the practice of it was slowly squeezed out of me in my last relationship, and also because I am regularly paralyzed by my doing-being-seeing-everythinig-everywhere-all-at-once nature. I often wake up in the morning and feel like I could literally explode from the desire to scatter myself into a million different pieces and then let those pieces blow around in the wind, across every ocean and continent, brushing up against all corners of the world until there’s nothing left.

If that seems like a lot, that’s because it is. I am a lot. I am so much. I am full to the brim with muchness. My multitudes have multitudes. I am overflowing with wild. This has always been true, even when I’ve tried to snuff it out for the sake of other people.

Always, always for the sake of other people, and to the detriment of myself, and, quite frankly, everyone else around me who has no desire to see said snuffing occur. I know I’m not alone in that. “I dimmed my light for him/them” has become the battle cry of women everywhere in recent years, myself included. I’ve talked about it ad nauseam with friends and in some of my writing, and my social media algorithm is full of examples. It’s a more universal experience than I ever could have imagined.

It’s a shame when the dimming happens, and it’s glorious when the light eventually starts to come back. My own light has been brightening over the past year especially, glowing with a force that has been life-shifting, drawing people and opportunities to me like moths to a flame, which in turn begets more moths, and then more. I genuinely like my full self for the first time in years. I love myself, actually. I love my sense of humor, my sexuality, my idiosyncrasies. I love my wild.

I had to tame the wild for so long that now it’s all I want to be, because when I’m wild I can’t get hurt. Wild Rachel is impulsive and fun. She hops in the car at a moment’s notice and drives across the country. She skips work to play. She kisses boys on a whim without caring whether or not they actually value her as a human being. She does what she wants, when she wants. She is free.

I love this Rachel. She is, at her core, my most feral and raw self. Flexing these wings has saved me, and I’m grateful to finally be returning to the fundamentals of my being.

And.

Because there’s almost always an and.

And: I love my wild so much that I’ve become fiercely protective of it. Perhaps too protective; building walls where there needn’t be any and nurturing a sense of independence that doesn’t allow me the full vulnerability that is also a necessary part of being human. Along with the wildness has come a hardening - not anything too solid or permanent, but a malleable shell that allows me to peek my head out from time to time to look around and then duck back into safety if necessary.

It’s comfortable in its own way, this shell, but I’ve never been overly comfortable with comfort, and it’s getting a little boring. Too much of a good thing, you know? And so, for what seems like the millionth time in my 39 years, I observe where I’m at and look to find some balance.

I’ve spent the past few months really digging deep into what balance looks like, and I’ve realized that what I’ve been missing the most is softness. Because while I am at my core a stubbornly independent explorer, I am also at my core (because multitudes!) a sweet, romantic little lovergirl, who wants nothing more than to flirt and shower affection; to love and be loved in return.

Unfortunately, lovergirls can also easily be hurt; I am a prime example of this. Softness means vulnerability. It means trusting others with your heart, both romantically and platonically. It means asking for help and acknowledging loneliness. It means admitting that you do, in fact, need other people in a very fundamental way, and that you are not an exception to the rule when it comes to human emotion and community. That admission might be the scariest thing of all.

Softness was my default for a long time. There have been times I have become so soft that I almost melted away. But the antidote to that is not to do a 180 and go sprinting in the other direction. The remedy, instead, is to allow it all to exist at once. What if, and hear me out, I could be both my wild self, full of muchness, AND be soft and loveable, all at the same time? What if people (what if men?!) could actually love it all simultaneously? Groundbreaking stuff. At least, it is for me.

The cultural trend for the last several years has been for people to choose a word that will set the stage for each new year. Much like resolutions, though, I’ve never been the best at following through. I love the concept of setting an intention, but one word has always seemed too restrictive. So, this year, for my birthday, I’m choosing two words that I want to carry me through the end of this decade of life. Wild, that I might continue to nurture my adventurousness and feral spirit, and soft, that I might allow my squishy inner lovergirl to roam free. Wild and soft. Soft and wild. Two seemingly opposing ways of existing in the world, with lots of space to discover and settle in between.

Happy fall, friends. Thanks for being here. I’m looking forward to using this year to grease my rusty writing chops and see what it’s like to tap into the soft, vulnerable inner workings of my mind, which, if you followed me in my blogging years, used to be what I was best at. The thought of it is scary, but exciting and fresh and new and rejuvenating too.

Here’s to another spin around the sun.