About the Quiet Wild
on writing and growth, courtesy of ron weasley
“The forest’s turned it wild.”
—Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
It’s a throwaway line about an enchanted car from what is neither my favorite scene nor story, but for whatever reason, something about phrase has called to me for more than a decade. A sort of pseudo-philosophical ear worm.
The forest’s turned it wild.
What would it mean to turn wild?
Why does it happen? How does it happen? Do you simply wake up wild one day, or is it a slow transformation? Is the forest always a part of it? Or can one turn wild in the city? Suburbs? The freezer section of the grocery store? The shower?
How do you know when something’s turned wild? Or someone?
Because the question that whispered loudest of all:
Can people turn wild?
Say, and I’m just throwing this out there, a fairly mellow, risk-averse, highly-introverted 40-year old romance author living in the middle Manhattan?
Yes.
Yes, absolutely, the quiet ones can and do turn wild.
But it looks different. Less blowing it all up, more about calming it all down. For me, turning wild has meant going softly feral around the edges. Dabbling in mysticism, embracing aging, learning how to stop saying yes when every part of my being screams I know I’m supposed to want to do that, and I just don’t.
Turning wild, for me, has meant embracing that my identity as a writer and my role as a human are inextricably linked. Just not solely a romance writer, as I’ve believed for so long. Joan Didion said she wrote to figure out what she was thinking, and that’s true of me as well, I suppose, but mostly I write because I feel the most me in the written word.
This website is an expansion of that realization: my writings about everything and nothing, from deep and lonely 3am thoughts to strong opinions on onion dip.
I always thought that enchanted car from the Harry Potter world was deemed wild because it has escaped something, but I got that part wrong. Turning wild isn’t about escaping life, it’s about creating the one we were meant for. Even if—especially if—the rest of the world thinks it’s weird.
Welcome to the quiet wild.