Rediscovering that buried ember in trying times
More than twenty-five years ago, three friends and I drove round and round Monument Circle in our hometown of Indianapolis, convertible top-down and music blasting. It was 1992 so the Pretty Woman soundtrack was our music of choice. Of course, it was Natalie Cole’s Wild Women Do. The refrain was our anthem: “Wild women do and we don’t regret it / Wild women show what they’re goin’ through / Wild women do what you think they’ll never / What you only dream about wild women do.”
We were sixteen and the sense of endless possibility was as intoxicating as the cheap beer we snuck from our parents: the rush of freedom that came with the first of us getting our license, the power we felt as we experimented with fashion, with our new-found sexuality, with every limit we could test, every rule we could bend or break.
But nothing tames the wild heart like middle age and an enduring pandemic. Being at home, far from friends and family and travel and adventure, for an entire year threatens to smother that living spark under layers of existential dread, boredom, and struggle. Despite years of mostly living up to my sixteen-year-old self’s aspirations — traveling the world, falling in love, climbing mountains, protesting injustice, writing books — this pandemic has rocked me in a way that not even the death of my father, a crushing international move, and periods of intense financial stress ever did.
So when my beloved but surprisingly noisy/messy/hungry family invaded my quiet house as both school and work moved virtual, it shook me. My quiet work environment shattered — my thoughts as chaotic as the house, like the news, as the world. And through it, all were woven the pervading fear that the pandemic might take our loved ones, our jobs, our livelihoods, away from us.
We fared better than so many others. We’re healthy. We both kept our jobs. My mother and both my in-laws have now been vaccinated. Elderly family members have either avoided COVID-19 or survived it. And our teenagers, who struggled mightily with a hard first semester of e-learning, came through it without flunking out (though it was a near thing). Yet there I sat, in my yoga pants and slippers, feeling farther than I ever had from that sassy teenager who sang her heart out in a convertible nearly thirty years ago.
My first instinct was to retreat. To hibernate. To hide how I was feeling, especially since on the surface, we were getting by. But as a second pandemic — the mental health crisis that is hitting us almost as hard as the virus — emerged on the heels of the first one, I questioned that instinct. Because each time I reached out to a friend or colleague, each time I was real about the anxiety and depression I was feeling, I learned that they, too, were suffering.
What if I didn’t hide? What would happen if I talked about it? About finding a therapist, about being diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), about the way that ignoring anxiety, trying to hide it away, often leads to depression. About how the videos showing us how to wash our groceries to keep them from infecting us with COVID-19 left me curled in a fetal position on the couch as bags of food lay unopened on the porch like some nefarious and deadly threat.
I started small. I told my friends about my struggles. I told my mom. I talked with my kids, who were just as depressed as I was. I chimed in on a few discussions on social media. Is this what Natalie Cole meant by wild women showing what we’re going through? I think so. It didn’t feel wild at first, but like so many things, it started with this tiny ember. This tiny admission that I was not OK, but that I was getting there, that I would be.
By this past fall, I was ready to fan that ember of wildness a bit. I made a commitment in both my business and my personal life to live out loud. That led, as everything in my life does, to writing about my experiences. So I kicked off the new year with an article on The Writing Cooperative called Writing Myself Back Into the Light. In it, I admitted all the ugly things that I’d been holding inside — how writing can be so much like grieving, how it’s plagued with insecurities and professional jealousies, how easy it is to let that block you, how close I came to quitting.
I didn’t know how badly I needed to talk about this, to write about it until I took that first risk. Until I felt the first bit of wildness returning to my battered heart. How I needed to whisper wildness onto that buried ember, to rekindle it, to set it aglow. But as soon as I did, I knew that wildness was not something that only existed in past-tense for me. It’s still there, calling to me, waiting for the moment when it can burst once again into glorious flame.
Those three friends who drove around Monument Circle with me in 1992 live across the country from me now. And I don’t think any of us owns a convertible anymore. But, especially after a year of isolation, I needed that same kind of connection. The universe must have heard my unspoken need. Because it delivered up a beautiful sunny spring day and a break in my work schedule. I texted some friends and, amazingly, they were up for a Thursday adventure. We met up with our bikes and off we went. As we rode along the beautiful Sammamish River Trail, one of many in our gorgeous Pacific Northwest home, I felt the wildness I thought I’d lost surge within me.
The Wild Women of 2021 look a whole lot different than the ones I remember from 1992. But even though our conversations were about all those things I thought had tamped down my wildness — the pandemic, parenting teenagers, caring for aging parents — the echo of the past was there. The things both wild and mundane that we’d been through as we navigated our teenage years, our coming adulthood, our budding wildness. The games. The foibles. The triumphs and disasters of being young and newly free. They have taken a different shape, as my body has in the past twenty-five years. But the wildness, the laughter, the dreams are all still there — a state of mind rather than a phase or moment in time. And I reveled in the rediscovered wildness within me as I biked with these other wild women, smiles on our faces, sunshine at our backs, and songs in our hearts.
No sadness. No restraint. No regrets.
If you enjoyed this, check out more pandemic reflections on Medium.
Julie Artz is an author, editor, and book coach living in Redmond, Washington with her husband, two strong-willed teenagers, and a couple of naughty furry familiars. Learn more at about her book coaching services at JulieArtz.com, subscribe to her #Create2021 newsletter, or follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
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