More Wild

Taking care of myself becomes something elusive sometimes, I can feel that I need to be taken care of, I deeply feel that ragged sense that I am not at ease, not whole, not holy any more, and this seems to turn in on itself, to feed on itself as I grapple to get back to just a sense of everyday OK-ness. I tell myself of course you feel out of sorts, you have spent weeks of having your daughter move, then your mother move, and in the course of moving my mom, sorting through memories that I’d forgotten for good reason. And now, now I am behind in my own housekeeping, bill paying and general life upkeep. I am behind and I am left with this residual feeling of growing up in a home that was chaotic and thrived on fear and mistrust. I have worked really really hard to create a home that is filled with love and trust, and yet I still haven’t gotten the chaotic part totally in check. And I hate it. And it shows me exactly that my life is too busy and where I need to change. 

And so, to take care of myself in the midst of this chaos, I bought myself a book that I’ve been wanting to read, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Once I got past wondering if it would be as good as all the hype (it is), and being jealous that she is published and awesome (she is), I let myself sink into her story, her adventure, her own hero’s quest, and it dawned on me, how un-wild I have become. How fear has crept into corners of my life where I’d never want to admit it to anyone. How when I decided to make myself take a walk yesterday morning, I told Megan this story that I’d kept to myself for a really long time, before I left. Well, Megan, there is a part of me that is afraid to walk around the lakes, it sounds silly, I know. The lake I walk is always full of people, it is daylight, it is Minneapolis, for Pete’s sake. But a long time ago, when I was 12 or 13, and I walked around a city lake in the evening, I was in a bad mood, a defiant mood, mad at my family. And so when a man in a car called out, hey, do you want to go for a ride, instead of walking quickly away, I approached this man in a car. 

And when he said, get in. I did. Once in, I knew I’d made a mistake. He was not young and cute, but older and disheveled looking. We chatted, he drove down Hennepin Avenue and by the corner of Hennepin and Lake he had his hand tangled in my long brown hair in a way that made me feel sick. He turned down a side street lined in mansions and parked by Lake of the Isles. It was starting to be sundown, and I was starting to be afraid, and I was definitely afraid when he locked the car doors and grinned at me. I told him I needed to get home, and he wouldn’t listen. He started to undo his belt and I was trapped. As he talked about how he’d love to have a girlfriend like me, I went along with it. I told him I’d like to be his girlfriend, but we’d have to date for a while before anything happened. He told me he wanted to take me on a picnic and I agreed. I agreed to be his girlfriend, but he’d have to be nice to me, and he had to take me home, now. He softened, and agreed. 

I stupidly let him drop me off near my home. He knew my neighborhood, and I said I’d meet him at the lake the next day. When I never did, he started stalking me in the neighborhood, yelling things at me from his car. This went on for months. Of course I never told my parents, as they would (as they always did) have blamed me. And I blamed myself. And so, I told Megan this story, feeling a little like maybe she would think less of me. I have a few of these horrible men stories, tucked away, untold, unwritten, because as a young girl growing up, there were only two kinds of girls, good girls and bad girls, any evil men perpetrated on girls would then become internalized in the girl, the man remaining, well, only a man. If folks knew about the evil you were a bad girl, if you could hide it, pretend, store it away, you could fool folks into believing you were still good. I always wanted to be good, to be careful, not to be wild. 

After I told Megan this story I headed out to walk around the lake on a beautiful, sunny, Saturday morning. The walking path was crazy full of people. I walked a long time behind a couple of women talking loudly,  and so, I decided to walk away from the path, to walk on the sand, on the water’s edge. At first I thought, I will get my shoes wet and sandy, and then I realized that I’d become too careful, too worried, too unwild with myself. I thought of Cheryl Strayed, walking the Pacific Crest Trail, and I pushed myself to be more wild, and realized that what I thought was taking care of myself, was really, too often, living in fear. Fear still, of what people would think if they knew, fear still of someone lurking, fear still of not having the information I’ll need to keep myself safe. Fear that I’ll never figure out how to take really good care of myself and others, to be safe. Fear that the stories I tell should not be told. So, I just kept walking on the water’s edge, not caring if my shoes got wet and sandy. Instead of chatter and cell phones and the sound of shoes on paved path, I heard the water hitting the sand, I heard the wind in the trees, I felt the ground underneath me both soft and solid, unmovable and moving. I whispered to myself, become a little more wild, wild is not the undoing of us, it is us.