I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
The words feral and wild have distinct meanings. Wild refers to animals that have never been domesticated while feral refers to domesticated animals that have returned to a wild state.
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes of feral women:
I postulate the feral woman as one who was once in a natural psychic state—that is, in her rightful wild mind—then later captured by whatever turn of events, thereby becoming overly domesticated and deadened in proper instincts. When she has opportunity to return to her original wildish nature, she too easily steps into all manners of traps and poisons. Because her cycles and protective systems have been tampered with, she is at risk in what used to be her natural wild state. No longer wary and alert, she easily becomes prey.
This is from the chapter where Estés tells and explicates the fairy tale The Red Shoes, in which a young girl obtains fancy new manufactured red shoes (replacing her homemade red shoes) which make her dance and dance without being able to stop, until she must have someone cut off her feet, lest she die of exhaustion. This girl is like the feral woman who was once wild, but after having been domesticated, loses her instincts for self-preservation and healthy expression of creativity.
Estés writes:
If you have ever been captured, if you have ever endured hambre del alma, a starvation of the soul, if you have ever been trapped, and especially if you have a drive to create, it is likely that you have been or are a feral woman. The feral woman is usually extremely hungry for something soulful, and often will take any poison disguised on a pointed stick, believing it to be the thing for which her soul hungers.
This makes me think of how my marriage ended, with my leaving my husband for another man, for poison disguised on a pointed stick. The man wasn’t the poison, but the idea I held that he was my route to creativity was.
He and I engaged in obsessive communications, exchanging millions of words together (talking, chatting online, emailing) in the short time we were in a relationship. We also drank a lot, together and apart. We called evening happy hour creative time because we felt at our most creative when we had a buzz going.
Both of us found in the other, in this relationship, a pathway to expressing ourselves, one that we had lost.
I don’t trace my domestication to my marriage, however. I started becoming domesticated long before that, by a culture that wants girls and women to focus on being good and being attractive not expressing creativity, ambition, and boldness.
The ultimate domestication may have been when I left my nascent writing career to first become a math teacher, then to earn a PhD in research methods and statistics, and finally to work as a data scientist.
For the decade after that, as I worked as a data scientist, people would routinely say to me things like, “Oh you will be interested in this, Anne, look at this fascinating data!” or “You must be into poker, because you love statistics,” or “Here, read this interesting article about a math problem that’s been solved.”
And I would say, “I don’t love math. I don’t love numbers. I don’t play poker.”
I felt entirely misunderstood, and yet I had domesticated myself. I had chosen to get a PhD in a heavily quantitative subject. I had chosen to restart a career in technology, approved by society both with its financial and social rewards, I had climbed up into a gilded carriage, like the girl with the red shoes did, when she was encouraged to do so by an elderly woman.
I used to ponder whether getting my PhD led to my divorce, because it got me back in touch with my intellectual self. It did do that, but it was also another step into domestication and away from my authenticity.
The problem was never my husband; it was my career.
My affair partner may have been suffering in parallel, in his own version of ferality. Incredibly creative, verbal, and innovative who, like me, could fake it as a technologist, he too had domesticated himself in a career where his gifts had little outlet.
The psychological truth in “The Red Shoes” is that a woman’s meaningful life can be pried, threatened, robbed, or seduced away from her unless she holds on to or retrieves her basic joy and wild worth. The tale calls our attention to traps and poisons we too easily take into ourselves when we are caught in a famine of wild soul. Without a firm participation with the wild nature, a woman starves and falls into an obsession of “feel betters,” “leave me alones” and “love me— please.”
When she is starved, a woman will take any substitutes offered, including those that, like dead placebos, do absolutely nothing for her, as well as destructive and life-threatening ones that hideously waste her time and talents or expose her life to physical danger. It is a famine of the soul that makes a woman choose things that will cause her to dance madly out of control—then too, too near the executioner’s door.
I did start to dance madly out of control back in 2012, feeling starved of any way to create a meaningful life. I chose the substitute of obsessive love, which didn’t end with my divorce. This mad dancing continued as I chased after different red shoes (different romances) to see which ones might finally make me feel whole and healthy again.
I don’t want this for my daughters, both terribly creative and bold themselves.
A career in technology is not necessarily destructive of wildishness.
My older daughter tells me that it’s my tech career success that made her feel she could go into software engineering when she otherwise might not have had the confidence to do so.
When she was in high school, I encouraged her to take the higher level math class offered by the International Baccalaureate program she was enrolled in. I had made the mistake in college of underestimating myself mathematically, and I didn’t want her to do the same. She not only excelled in the class, she also put together a very interesting final thesis for the program on a mathematical topic I introduced her to.
It’s not the math and the computer programming that was domesticating for me. It was allowing the use of it to crowd out creativity that destroyed me.
My daughter always tells me, “software engineering is not my long-term direction. I want to focus on my writing.” She is a fiction writer. She writes short stories. So far, it seems, she hasn’t become feral.
Sometimes I think “if I cannot focus on my creative work for myself, I should instead do it for my daughters.”
When I consider going back to work in technology to make more money, I ask myself, “is that a good example to set for my daughters?” I know it’s not. I know focusing right now, at late midlife, on my painting and my writing is not just healthy for me, it’s healthy for those who come after me and look to me as someone to possibly emulate.
This is true even if I write and paint of things my daughters might rather not read.
As a young girl, I was already domesticated. I told my mother when I was in third grade, “Mickey is my idol.” Mickey was an eight-year-old boy in my class.
That led to “going with” a boy in seventh grade, drinking with the senior boys in the church parking lot in ninth grade, and my first serious romance at age 15 that, when it ended, left me depressed and drained and feral. In college as well, my focus was on finding romance, finding red shoes someone else made to put on so I might dance.
For some reason, I decided from an early age that the way I could feel most fully myself was by finding a boy or man to validate me. I decided this despite owning an incredible mind—creative, quick, and bold.
My daughters never thought this way or acted this way, as young girls and as teens, or for the most part didn’t. Perhaps they saw how I almost destroyed myself and destroyed our family by seeking nourishment in the wrong place. Or, more likely, they just have different paths to take through domestication, ferality, and refinding wildness.
Estés would say my soul was hungry:
To be in the state of hambre del alma, a starved soul, is to be made relentlessly hungry. Then a woman burns with a hunger for anything that will make her feel alive again. A woman who has been captured knows no better, and will take something, anything, that seems similar to the original treasure, good or not. A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look “cleaned up and combed” on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.
My soul doesn’t feel hungry anymore. I’m making my own red shoes to dance in now.
What is the solution for a woman who has been domesticated and become feral, sneaking what she needs instead of going after it directly?
Estés writes:
To detour off this polarized path, a woman has to surrender the pretense. Sneaking a counterfeit soul-life never works. It always blows out the sidewall when you’re least expecting it. Then it’s misery all around. It’s better to get up, stand up, no matter how homemade your platform, and live the most you can, the best you can, and forgo the sneaking of counterfeits. Hold out what has real meaning and health for you.
And:
If you want to re-summon Wild Woman, refuse to be captured. With instincts sharpened for balance—jump anywhere you like, howl at will, take what there is, find out all about it, let your eyes show your feelings, look into everything, see what you can see. Dance in red shoes, but make sure they’re the ones you’ve made by hand. I can promise that you will become one vital woman.
My current project is my howl.