TEACHINGS OF THE WILD WOMAN

Have you ever wondered how you managed to end up in such an odd family as yours? 
If you have lived your life as an outsider, as a slightly odd or different person, if you are a loner, one who lives at the edge of the mainstream, you have suffered. Yet there also comes a time to row away from all that, to experience a different vantage point, to emigrate back to the land of one’s own kind. Let there be no more suffering, no more attempting to figure where you went wrong. The mystery of why you were born to whomever you were born to is over, finis, terminado, finished.

Rest for a moment at the bow and refresh yourself in the wind coming from your homeland. For years women who carry the mythic life of the Wild Woman archetype have silently cried, “Why am I so different? Why was I born into such a strange [or unresponsive] family?” Wherever their lives wanted to burst forth, someone was there to salt the ground so nothing could grow.

They felt tortured by all the proscriptions against their natural desires. 
If they were nature children, they were kept under roofs.
If they were scientists, they were told to be mothers.
If they wanted to be mothers, they were told they’d better fit the mold entirely.
If they wanted to invent something, they were told to be practical.
If they wanted to create, they were told a woman’s domestic work is never done.
Sometimes they tried to be good according to whichever standards were most popular, and didn’t realize till later what they really wanted, how they needed to live. 

Then, in order to have a life, they experienced the painful amputations of leaving their families, the marriages they had promised under oath would be till death, the jobs that were to be the springboards to something more stultifying but better paying. They left dreams scattered all over the road.
Often the women were artists who were trying to be sensible by spending eighty percent of their time doing labor that aborted their creative lives on a daily basis.
Although the scenarios are endless, one thing remains constant: they were pointed out very early on as “different’’ with a negative connotation.
In actual fact, they were passionate, individual, inquiring, and in their right instinctive minds.



Clarissa Pinkola Estes