A new chapter.

An update and an offering for the brave and true lovers of HALF WILD.

Hey there. It’s been a minute. How is everyone? I have something exciting to share. Don’t worry. This time, everyone is fine.

It’s almost as if certain bummerific things had to happen the way they happened to propel life forward. Almost like there was some bigger plan that I can trust even when it hurts, knowing that it’s just growing pains. Almost.

So, I used to travel.

Then the world changed and travel got less fun and I stopped. That sudden and needed but totally unplanned change created a previously inaccessible opportunity for reflection. I stepped into a stillness that allowed fresh perspective. I examined, with two feet firmly planted, why I always felt such a strong urge to run away.

Underneath the shiny veneer of wanderlust lurked a hunger for novelty. Below that, the rotten remains of a strongly held belief that I was not enough. Each adventure I took was a peacock feather in my cap to signal that I was interesting, adventurous, and happy. Not to say that I wasn't all of those things, because I loved my nomadic life and it feels like a very real part of who I am. It wasn't all of me, yet it received the lion’s share of my energy as if it was. I suddenly had the chance to confront that thought and discover if I was okay, even if I never got another stamp on my passport or took another selfie on top of a mountain.

Once I uncovered that motif, I used the lockdown as a creative vortex and compiled those road trips, therapy sessions, business trips, panic attacks and all the rest into a book. And that book is actually real and coming out this year. (!!!)

What follows here are the first 2 chapters.

If you enjoy reading them, you have options. First, leave me a review, will you? Just a sentence or two in the comments, or shoot me a reply. Make it punchy and maybe I'll print it on the cover! (I'm not joking.)

Second, if you are interested in staying up-to-speed on the details of the book release and eventually maybe getting a copy, you can let me know here:

As always, thank you for being on this ride with me.

Whitney

One - The Scream

A little girl with a haircut shaped like a bowl rides her bike in a lonesome cul-de-sac. She is dressed in baggy boys’ clothes. She is alone and she can’t see me watching. She rides to the top of the street and looks out, waiting. Nothing happens. She rides on in expanding circles in the empty blacktop circle, wearing my favorite LA Dodgers t-shirt. On her cheek I see the little mole my mom liked to call a beauty mark. I feel the sudden urgent need to grab her by the rosy cheeks and tell her that it’s okay, that she’s okay. I want to take her to ice cream and tell her that she’s allowed to want more and that the emptiness she feels won’t last forever, unless she wants it to.

I opened my eyes and felt my stomach turning and grinding like a broken washing machine. It whirred and roiled with a whine that howled in my ears, subjective and unheard. I turned my head to look at my therapist. Her gaze was infuriatingly casual, as if I hadn’t just hallucinated myself into my own childhood. My body ached, something pulled from deep inside. It clenched so powerfully that organ failure felt like a legitimate possibility. I asked aloud - only half joking - if I was going to expire right there on her couch. “That’s not a symptom, girlie,” she said confidently, “it’s a feeling.” She must have thought I was some kind of idiot because I was thirty-something and she felt the need to tell me that feelings were something that you feel. 

“Yes, I know that one could feel feelings, but not like this, not like, in your body.” That space was reserved for orgasms and indigestion. I thought I sounded very erudite and intellectual when I explained to her that emotions were simply concepts to be described with words. “The body,” I argued, “is for symptoms, and anything that deviates from the banality of ‘fine, thanks’ means something is wrong.” And something was wrong, because when I saw that lonely little girl on her bike, I felt how badly she ached for more friends and greater adventures. She was sickly and pained from a lack of giggles, and I needed to fix it for her. Even after decades of growing up and being good, she still rode her bike in concentric circles on top of my solar plexus. The weight of her wheels left tread marks on my insides.