Rewilding and letting go

What if you started letting go of who you’re told you’re supposed to be?

Rewilding an area can mean allowing it to go back to its original state.

A state where the native flowers grow. Where the stream gets to flow without manmade influence.

Wikipedia states, “Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from other forms of ecological restoration in that rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems.^[1] It is also distinct from other forms of restoration in that, while it places emphasis on recovering geographically specific sets of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystems prior to human influence, rewilding is open to novel or emerging ecosystems which encompass new species and new interactions.”

I believe that humans can also have rewilding. We can come back to a state where we can honor our nervous system responses, honor our feelings, and deeply listen to ourselves. These can lead to new interactions, and recovery from ways of living that hurt.

The grief and healing of watching a baby get what you never had

Lately I’ve been watching my friend with her new baby.

This baby is like a wild animal, she is watching us, and we are watching her. We watch her discover things, at her own pace.

I love watching them together. Hearing my friend explain how she’s treating this baby, and why, is so so healing.

It brings up grief in me not just for myself but for all of the other children who do not get such deep attention and ability to sit with their own nervous systems without being rushed from thing to thing.

This baby is allowed to crawl and decide who she wants to engage with or not.

She is dry brushed and held, but in a structured way. When she meets a new person she is given time to observe them before she decides how she wants to engage, if at all.

She also has strict rules. She’s not allowed to hit her parents, or knock things off tables. She has a strict bedtime, she’s getting toilet trained, and she is not allowed to look at screens or play with her parents phones. Having these strong boundaries as well as autonomy when interacting with others is a great mix.

Consequently she is developing good boundaries from the very beginning.

As my friend says, “It’s that delicate dance between structure/loving grounded rules and personal autonomy that creates safety and trust.”

What we do to babies and children

This is me and my grandfather, he was 46 when I was born.

How she is raising this child is profoundly different from how I grew up.

As a baby I was moved from adult to adult, from house to house, state to state, and country to country, and told to embrace and kiss people I didn’t want to touch. I was told to work and not play. We don’t let babies or children have body autonomy. Maybe this happened to you too?

I was treated like 1/3rd or 1/5th of a person, an extension of my parents. I was told I was their property, that I had to do what they said. i was told they took me into this world and they could take me out.

At a very young age I wanted to advocate for children to take over the world. I wanted us to be treated like people.

There’s a whole movement called child liberation that you can check out.

a child riding a carousel — I am about 7 here.

I still think the world would be better if children took over.

Children are subjected to adultism, which is when they are treated like they don’t know their own minds, they have no autonomy or freedom, and they aren’t allowed to choose their activities, their interests, their chores.

Dr Devon Price wrote an interesting article about this

Hiding in closets, hiding in attics

As a child I was often hiding in closets. Around the age I am below, I had a closet that I hid in pretty frequently. It was something that helped me avoid the abuse at home, and the adults not letting me be a child.

Sometimes I could go for a walk and hide outside

I had an attic to stay in sometimes when I wanted to hide.

And there was a closet under the stairs attached to my bedroom that I hid in also

Very Harry Potter vibes, I know, but I didn’t actually sleep there.

People used to say if you have a girl first, that’s good, she can take care of the other children. I did take care of the other children. If I was around it was assumed that was what I would be doing, instead of playing like any other child. This is parentification.

What is a parentified child?

A parentified child puts on a persona. They end up not knowing who they are outside of someone who is made use of. I rode this parentified child role all the way into the nonprofit sector and my personal relationships and beyond. Mothering people, driving them away. Not listening to myself. I thought doing things for others was how you justified your existence.

I grew up to be a person who was afraid to share her needs and wants. Who kept trying to be with a family that consistently ignored her boundaries, needs, and wants. There are still people in my family I talk with, but some people are not going to get any more of my time.

I got to stay with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle for two years when I was little, and those were the happiest two years of my childhood.

Family Scapegoating abuse

Not only was I a parentified child, but I was also the scapegoat.

That means I was told that anytime anything was wrong in the family, it was my fault. I am starting to understand Family Scapegoating abuse. Read more about Family Scapegoating abuse

When you’re in the scapegoat role, you can also see it playing out in workplaces. I had this play out in a workplace, and that’s how I started being a workplace advocate. I never wanted anyone to go through that again, what I had to go through. In some places it’s called Workplace Bullying. And in others, it’s illegal. One of my first presentations as I started my business in 2009 was on workplace bullying. No wonder I was so passionate about it. It was describing my life. Being blamed for things that were not your fault. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, always, with people who couldn’t regulate their own emotions.

Now that I’m understanding more how it all happened, I am starting to write about it.

Here’s my first article about it.

How did you get so good at dreaming?

Getting ready to escape

Around 14 was when I consciously started to count down to the time I could leave. I couldn’t wait. I was ready to go to college and get out of the house very young. It was so hard to wait, I ran away one time. But I came back because they called the police to make me come home.

Breaking the chain now feels incredible.

It feels like I’m breaking a generational curse.

I felt like I had to be useful and help others. Maybe you grew up that way too, making yourself useful. Maybe you were a parentified child, and then it bled over into what you do now. Now I think maybe becoming a fundraiser is a trauma response.

The unlearning, rewilding, letting go process

The first step is feeling your feelings, and processing them, however that looks for you.

The feelings and needs wheels have helped me a lot. I’ve also turned them into magnets and given them as gifts.

In the last 5 years I’ve gone through a lot of grief and anger. Anger is a gift!

I have a lot of compassion now for that little girl now for what she had to do to survive in a hostile environment.

Since 2020 I’ve been going to therapy and unlearning, and rewilding myself from this self that had to perform to survive.

I am learning how to play again, and learning how to respect play. When I make art, now, I try not to think about if it’s good or not. Let my hand make marks on the paper.

When I’ve been writing, each day for the last 1000 days, I’ve been just listening to myself.

I used to have such distain for people who played video games. Now I can sit and watch my partner play video games for hours. I can approve of this, because I am letting myself play too.

How does this relate to changing careers?

I used to chronically overwork in a desperate attempt to prove to everyone that I was worth attention, money, time. For years in my nonprofit jobs and then in my business, until I burned out. Why did I do this?

We are actively encouraged to overwork in the sector, and we are chronically underpaid. This leads to high turnover and inefficient working environments that then hurt the people we serve. It serves us to unlearn, rewild, and do less.

The nonprofit industrial complex seizes and co-opts language from revolutionary movements. It uses it to justify funding, jobs, and whole industries of people who are deeply uneducated about history and profoundly removed from the historical reasons for the need for their services. This is related to white savior complex and white supremacy. A deep structural shift is needed, for us to get out from these biases, and ways of working.

But it’s not just the salaries and the overwork. It’s HOW we are working that isn’t working.

We are encouraged to ignore our bodies, our needs, and just unquestioningly put everything into the mission.

So I have been engaged in the process of unlearning. Moving more slowly. Breathing and going outside more. When I sit with people, when I present now, we start with how we are feeling and end with how we are feeling. We pause more and breathe and stretch together. The book My Grandmother’s Hands has been useful to me in this way.

I still get to work with people, and I still get to help people, just on my terms, in a structured way. I’m not overgiving anymore. I shut the door to a system that wants to drag us through the street.

Who would you be if you let go of your nonprofit identity?

Maybe the child in you still needs to be heard.

Who would you be, if you weren’t a helper in the nonprofit sector?
Who would you be, if not someone who feels like she has to run around saving people all the time?
Who would you be, if you were alone and could just sit and think and take things at your own pace?

Watching this little baby get a sense of herself and her wants and needs from the very start is mindblowing to witness.

I am seeing how slow her nervous system is, and I am learning from her.

I am learning how to be slower with my own nervous system. How to have better boundaries. And how to say no as often as I want.

Even to people, places, situations, work that I have a long history with. Even to that.

It is so tremendously liberating.

My wish for you

I hope someday you can watch someone parent like this, treating their baby like a person from the beginning.

I hope someday you get the deep listening you need.

I hope someday you slow down and be with your nervous system, be with your feelings and curiosity, as slow as you need to.

There’s no going back to who you were before this world subjected you to adultism, but you can still reparent yourself now, and nurture that small voice inside you who knows exactly what to do.