There's a version of you that existed before you learned to be palatable.
She was loud. She wanted things out loud. She took up room without apologising for it, cried when she was sad, said no without a paragraph of explanation attached.
You probably can't remember exactly when she went quiet. There's rarely one moment. It's a thousand small corrections — don't be so much, don't be difficult, don't be dramatic, be nice — until being smaller becomes so automatic you stop noticing you're doing it.
They didn't burn the wild out of us. They taught us to hide her.
The pretty cage
Here's the part nobody warns you about: the cage is usually a nice one.
It looks like a good job. A capable reputation. Being the one who holds everything together, who remembers the birthdays, who never drops the ball. From the outside it reads as a life well built — and a lot of it genuinely is.
But there's a difference between a life you chose and a life you performed your way into. And the tell is simple: you can't feel much inside it.
Not the bad things. Not the good ones either. Just a low, competent hum.
What we mean by wild
Wild doesn't mean reckless. It isn't about burning your life down or becoming someone unrecognisable.
It means the parts of you that were never supposed to be managed in the first place:
- The instinct — the knowing that arrives before the reasoning does, the one you've been taught to override
- The rage — not cruelty, but the clean anger that tells you a line was crossed
- The softness — the ability to be moved, which you buried because it looked like weakness
- The pleasure — wanting things simply because they feel good, with no productive justification attached
- The voice — saying the true thing in the room instead of the smooth one
- The courage to want more — a life bigger than the one you were quietly expected to settle for
None of that is gone. It's just been unused for a long time, and unused things get stiff.
Why she doesn't come back at home
You can read about this. You can journal about it, therapise it, understand it completely — and still walk back into Monday exactly the same.
Because the version of you that everyone knows is held in place by your environment. Your phone. Your roles. The people who need you to stay recognisable. At home you're surrounded by evidence of who you've agreed to be.
Something has to actually interrupt it.
That's what the land does. Not metaphorically — practically. It's very hard to keep performing composure in a place that doesn't care whether you're composed.
So we're taking ten women to Kenya
Seven days on wild land at Ol Pejeta Conservancy. Daily safaris. Sisterhood. Healing. Movement. Sound. Locally prepared meals. Wildlife close enough to reset your nervous system.
Ten women. That's the whole group.
Not because small sounds exclusive, but because you cannot do this work in a crowd. Ten is the number where nobody performs — where by day three the polite version of everyone has quietly left the building and something more honest shows up in her place.
And we've made the logistics deliberately simple: everything is included except your flight. Accommodation, meals, safaris, facilitation, transport from Nairobi and back. You pick your room and book your flight. We handle the rest.
The reason for that isn't convenience for its own sake. It's that decision fatigue is the enemy of this kind of work. Women who spend the week managing logistics never fully arrive.
The question underneath
Most women who read something like this feel two things at once.
A yes — immediate, physical, somewhere in the chest.
And then, about four seconds later, the list. The timing. The money. Who would cover things. It's self-indulgent. Maybe next year.
Notice which one came first.
The list isn't wrong, exactly. Those are real considerations. But it's worth being honest that the list has been showing up for years, and it will have a fresh version ready next year too. The yes is the part that's harder to manufacture.
Into the Wild
Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya
November 28 – December 4, 2027
There are only ten places in this story. Read the full itinerary, or reach out if you want to talk it through with us first — most women do before they book, and we'd rather you came in with your eyes open.
Is one of them yours?