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There were hundreds of women standing outside a courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Thursday—a silent outcry echoed by women everywhere, reverberating across the internet by the millions.

SHE NEEDED HELP was written boldly across pink shirts—three words so many women feel in every fiber of their being.

Mothers traveled from across the country. Women who have never met Lindsay Clancy—or her three children who were so tragically taken from this world—were gathered together while a jury decided whether Lindsay was criminally responsible.

A jury who is still yet to decide.

And all over social media, women are adding their voices to the outcry. They’re telling their own stories of postpartum depression, intrusive thoughts, doctors who didn’t believe them, husbands who didn’t understand how badly they were drowning, and what it feels like to carry babies and homes and families while privately disintegrating.

Contrary to the belief of some (ahem, the manosphere), women are not responding this way because we cannot comprehend the horror of what happened to three innocent children. Cora, Dawson, and Callan deserved to grow up. Their deaths are an unbearable tragedy. Women who give birth, become mothers, and bring life into this world know the unfathomable, deep, unrelenting love we carry for our children.

We are capable of holding the unbearable truth that these children are no longer here while also recognizing something frighteningly familiar in Lindsay’s story—in the systems surrounding her and in everything that came before their deaths.

We’re recognizing ourselves in Lindsay’s desperate attempts to get help, and in the terrible pain she experienced within a system that was supposed to help her.

The exhausted woman. The frightened woman. The woman asking for help. The mother who was profoundly unwell and yet continued performing the ordinary tasks of motherhood well enough that people around her could believe she was okay.

“She seemed fine.”

Perhaps few phrases capture women’s pain and systematic dismissal quite like those words. The words Patrick Clancy himself uttered on the stand. And I think women everywhere felt the weight of them—in that soul-deep place where generations of women’s dismissed pain still lives.

Women Have Been Screaming That We Are Not Okay

For generations, women have been telling the world that we are hurting—many of us desperately voicing our pain for years, for lifetimes, wanting someone somewhere to hear our cries.

And so many of us, like Lindsay Clancy have told all the people we were supposed to tell. We have followed the rules, taken notes, advocated for ourselves, all while obediently listening to the professionals and taking the drugs we were supposed to take.

We’ve told doctors. We’ve told husbands. We’ve told churches. We’ve told therapists. We’ve told police. We’ve told courts. We’ve told employers. We’ve told our families. We’ve told entire political systems.

Yet our pain deepens. The drugs so much of the time feel like a Band-Aid thrown at a cookie-cutter diagnosis the professional learned about in school—our complicated, visceral experience reduced to symptoms on a page. Our pain, watered down to ink in a textbook. And when our suffering doesn’t fit neatly within that textbook mold, we are blamed and discarded.

In today’s medical system, women are so often made responsible not merely for communicating our pain, but for proving that it is serious enough to warrant intervention. Our pain is not believed but put on trial. I need help becomes the beginning of an exhausting negotiation rather than the end of one. We beg for an advocate—for even one professional to stand in our corner—but so many of us are left advocating for ourselves while already drowning. Not being believed becomes a secondary pain, running nearly as deep as the pain we were trying to voice in the first place.

This experience has become so familiar among women that we have language for it: medical gaslighting. Medical trauma. Some of us have been dismissed so many times that simply walking back into a doctor’s office can become frightening in itself.

Lindsay’s story resonates with so many women because she was not quiet about her suffering. She told her husband. She told her doctors. And further, she knew the medical system. She was a nurse. She documented her symptoms and repeatedly sought help through the systems she was told to trust. And still, somehow, we arrived here. Whatever the jury ultimately decides about her legal responsibility (and/or Patrick’s), women watching this trial are left with an agonizing question that reaches far beyond Lindsay Clancy:

When will women’s pain finally be heard?

Motherhood Was Built Around the Expectation That Women Will Disappear

But there is another reason I think mothers in particular are watching this trial with such visceral recognition: we know what it feels like to suffer while everyone around us considers that suffering an ordinary and acceptable part of motherhood.

We are expected to give our bodies to pregnancy and birth, our breasts to feeding, our nights to waking, our days to caregiving, our careers and ambitions when necessary, our emotional energy to keeping everyone else regulated—and somehow emerge from this enormous transfer of self feeling fulfilled.

I was one of those mothers. I was twenty-eight, living in a small apartment in Denver after leaving my job to care for my newborn full-time because daycare would have cost more than I made. Our families lived in other states, my circle of people was gone, and my husband had become the breadwinner—a shift he struggled under and increasingly coped with through terrible addictions. I remember being alone in that apartment, getting up throughout the night with a screaming infant while exhausted, bleeding and dizzy from birth.

Nobody had prepared me for how much women bleed afterward. How much it hurts simply to pee. How physically broken and frightened you can feel while simultaneously being handed a tiny human being whose entire survival now depends on you. Even after the classes and books and preparation, there I was—in the dark, in some of the worst pain of my life, trying to keep another person alive while not living myself.

And somehow, all of this is treated as normal. Birth and postpartum are things women are simply expected to do. We are supposed to absorb the blood, pain, sleep deprivation, isolation, hormonal upheaval and terror—and then we are asked whether we’re enjoying motherhood. Needing too much help can itself feel like an admission of failure. If she’s home, why does she need childcare? If she wanted these children, why is she overwhelmed? Other mothers manage. Why can’t she?

Eventually, nobody even has to tell us to sacrifice anymore. We begin policing ourselves. We feel guilty for resting, ashamed for needing, selfish for wanting, monstrous for the anger and desperation that surface because we’ve been operating well beyond our breaking point for so long. And then we have to wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

Just like in The Giving Tree. We tell children it is a story about love: the tree gives the boy her apples, her branches, her trunk. Again and again, he returns needing something, and again and again, she gives away pieces of herself to provide it until there is almost nothing left of her. I wonder sometimes whether women were handed a similar definition of love. Give your body. Give your sleep. Give your labor. Give your attention. Give your career. Give your sexuality. Give your emotional regulation. Give your dreams. Give your identity. And if someone still needs another piece of you, cut that off too.

Then smile. Because this giving of all the pieces of yourself, we now call motherhood is supposed to make you happy.

The frightening part of The Giving Tree isn’t simply that the tree keeps giving. It’s that everyone believes giving is what the tree is for. And perhaps that is what so many women recognize in this trial: our suffering has been normalized because, for generations, suffering has been woven into the job description. As long as a woman can continue giving, the system can continue functioning around her pain.

But perhaps something is changing. Because women are beginning to recognize that pain in one another—and we are refusing to let each other carry it alone. We should never have had to carry this alone.

Women Are No Longer Waiting for Permission to Be Believed

Maybe that’s why hundreds of women stood outside a courthouse for someone they have never met. Maybe, in so many ways, they’re standing there for themselves too—for women everywhere. For the postpartum mother who frightened herself with her own thoughts. The abuse survivor nobody believed. The woman whose pain was dismissed by a doctor. The exhausted mother who cried behind the bathroom door, wiped her face, and went back to making dinner.

The woman who said I can’t do this anymore only to slowly realize that everyone around her had reduced her outcry to she’s just being emotional.

Something similar has been happening online. One woman tells her story and suddenly thousands respond, This happened to me too. Experiences we were taught to understand as shameful, individual female “failures” begin revealing themselves as collective patterns—patterns woven so insidiously into women’s lives that we once mistook them for our own shortcomings.

But we compared notes. We began naming out loud what was happening. And as we witnessed other women’s stories, we began recognizing pieces of our own pain—the pain we had buried, hidden, or carried alone. Our circumstances might be different from one another’s, but the societal and medical dismissal feels existentially familiar.

This year, we’ve experienced collective witnessing emerge around other women in the news as well. The circumstances surrounding Renee Good were profoundly different from Lindsay Clancy’s, but I felt something similar in the response from women afterward: a refusal to allow another woman’s humanity to be flattened, explained away, or forgotten.

Women were saying, in so many different ways: Look at her. See her. See her pain. See her humanity. Don’t explain her away. Don’t make her suffering disappear. Don’t tell us we didn’t see what we saw. We will not forget. Not anymore.

And perhaps social media and the online world, for all their faults, have given women something our mothers and grandmothers rarely possessed at this scale—the ability to gather around one another’s stories in real time and discover that what happened privately to one of us has happened, in different forms, to millions of us.

Maybe that’s what is changing now. Women are bearing witness to one another. Sharing stories. Naming patterns. Refusing to let another woman’s suffering disappear simply because acknowledging it makes other people uncomfortable. In What Women Want—And Why Most Men Don’t Know, I wrote about how deeply women long to be seen, heard, witnessed, and acknowledged. Perhaps we’re beginning to discover that we don’t have to wait quietly for someone else to recognize our humanity.

We can begin by recognizing it in ourselves—and in one another.

Conclusion

As women continue gathering outside that courthouse and others watch from their homes, telling their stories online and feeling a deep ache around this case—for the gravity of what happened to Cora, Dawson, and Callan and the terrible pain of recognition—perhaps now we understand a little more about why.

We know what it is to enter the visceral darkness of motherhood, to say I am not okay and still not be heard. By our husbands. By our doctors. By society.

That’s why SHE NEEDED HELP was written boldly across those pink shirts this week outside the courthouse—the words so many women feel in every fiber of their being. Because so many of us have begged for help till our voices were long spent.

To still be described as “She seemed fine.”

We know what it is to disappear inside the roles expected of us while everyone continues needing something. We know what it is to keep functioning long after we have stopped being well—trapped inside expectations that leave so little room for our pain that we feel like we are suffocating. And still, society and the medical system too often expect women to simply keep going. Keep enduring the pain. Keep giving pieces of ourselves. Keep functioning in the terrible darkness.

Now, perhaps, many of us are discovering the profound relief of other women looking at our pain and saying, I believe you. I understand. I’ve been there too. You are not alone.

But it’s not yet enough.

Because the question remains: Will even a tragedy this catastrophic be enough to change how seriously women’s suffering is taken? And perhaps the question reverberating from the women outside that courthouse and the millions bearing witness online is still the one women have been asking for generations:

When will women’s pain finally be heard?

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a trauma informed mental health and artistic publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to find truth, humanity, and healing. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly— and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

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Dear Reader,

My last letter to you (Lindsay Clancy and the brokenness women are expected to carry silently) was well received—beyond what I could have imagined. Reading the responses, especially those from the dear women who became paying readers in support of this little raw, honest and heartfelt publication, brought great tears to my eyes.

Even now as I recall your words, my eyes are filling with tears. It’s such a somatic response—filling the chest entirely. Like a great swell of emotion, paired with such goodness and appreciation.

Thank you.

I think maybe so many of us, myself included, needed that reminder to live free. To release ourselves from expectation and propriety—to smile in the mirror at our reflection as we washed the day’s grit from our face and make a pledge to disappoint more people. Especially as women and survivors, who have been conditioned to absorb. To please. To nod and abandon everything within ourselves.

But not today.

At least, not in the small moments—where we can build up our own self worth apart from those outside of ourselves and withstand the disappointment. Holding the knowledge of what that would feel like for them (the person or people we are disappointing) and the deep pain of that, as well as prioritizing our own worth and individuality. A defiance that used to bring sheer inner terror, now also balances with a great inner strength and self love.

To get to this place, we have climbed mountains so tall and so full of pain—very few would understand.

I felt this after I left my second pottery class yesterday. The one where I told you on Sunday, I had a panic attack afterwards? The one where afterwards I realized I hadn’t socialized with adults in that way in over a year—maybe two.

Pain causes many of us to withdraw. To a deep place within ourselves that feels safe. Safe from the world. But we do not actually live when we are there. It’s like a sort of hibernation. Restoring. I withdrew to that place—for good reason—but had not stepped out of my inner den.

Who would I be outside this dark and cozy place? That was a terror all of its own.

When I step outside, I have to face the world. It shines light onto my humanity. And what is that? Who was that? What has she had to endure? What a terrorizing thing to face.

After the pottery class this week and socializing with creative adults that were complete strangers to me, I felt all the doubt and fear flood me as I closed my car door. Last week at this time, the collapse had happened. All the doubt and fear closed in and flooded my system.

This week, I had said more during the class. I had talked about myself. I had made statements about myself and the world and others. I had put myself out there…

And I think for so many of us—for women, survivors and those who live with CPTSD—after an event like this we can ruminate. Going over and over and over exactly what we said, their facial expressions, their body language. The terror and anxiety can flood us in the aftermath of expression. Of not disappearing. Of stepping out of light from our dens. Of being a dot of black ink on a stark white blank canvas. Of being something—someone. Apart from others.

But I have felt this flood so many times before. Two years ago I wouldn’t have slept that night. Two years ago I would have twisted in sweat soaked sheets from the agony and anxiety—replaying every instance I could. Making sure I didn’t disappoint. Making sure I never made the other person uncomfortable. Making sure I was still accepted. Safe. Allowed.

But not yesterday.

Because I’ve learned that I deeply value women that unnerve me. Women that are so deeply connected with their inner knowing and others, that they burst forward with self and love and joy. I witnessed this in full as I watched My Brilliant Career on Netflix last week. I was so enthralled, I watched it till the wee hours of the morning—my whole self captivated entirely. Sybylla is everything I aspire to be. Bursting with life and self and it draws everyone around her in. She’s a light in the dark.

And she felt like my light, especially in the midst of Lindsay Clancy trial. That short series felt like a gift from the universe in such a needed time. I clung onto its message, and its characters and wept.

That same day, a gigantic bald eagle flew overhead as I drove the kids home from school. It’s head and tail sparkling white in the vivid sunlight—as it’s so bright here at 9,000 feet. I’ve never seen anything so majestic and beautiful. The day before that, the biggest rainbow I had ever seen cascaded across the sky over our drive home. I felt like I was in a dream. What is this new place we have moved to? Even today, as I look out at the mountains and shockingly blue sky, it feels surreal.

So far set from the dark and clouded prairie I have suffered so much of my life. It’s only been a few weeks since we left that place. Ground zero. A place full of so much trauma.

I thought as I stepped onto mountain soil and dusted the blood soaked prairie earth from my boots, that I would transform. That the pain would be left behind. But I am finding that this pain and that soil still clings. Now it is defined. Before it was a wash of all things, muddled in the flood of pain. I was at the bottom of the ocean in the deep dark. Not sure which way was up.

Now I have gasped air above. Choking out the waters of trauma and pain that have so long filled my lungs. And some of it still remains—the aftermath left on my mind, body and soul.

At least now, I can see light and breathe air and blink in the brightness. Now, I can truly feel the remnants of what that place and its people did to me. I was there so long, it set into the fiber of my being. It became chronic pain, hives, brain fog and dis-orientation. It darkened my world and I spent much of it, living in bed. Too little energy to leave the covers. Too full of pain to do ordinary tasks.

And now I am here. The pain is not gone. In fact, when I arrived, I saw it all for what it was. The shape of it. The weight.

Because now, I am taking steps out of the waters. Out of the den. Out of the rubble.

Facing the pain, now painted in black and white against a backdrop of mountains and eagles and rainbows. I can see its shape. Define its outline more clearly. Now, it is apart from the world I had known—that had encompassed all of me.

Each day as I rise in the pre-dawn light, breathing in mountain air in this new place, I face it. I feel it. I know it.

And I show it a bit more of the mountains.

What it is to feel light. And joy and love and…life.

And be okay with living instead of disappearing. I am still working on convincing all parts of myself of this fact.

To be okay with being. In all its beauty and pain. Disappointing people in the process. Finding a new way. Making mistakes—decisions in the mess. Being a mess. Because for so long I lived in the shadows. This part of living again and starting over is messy. And before, that was never allowed. That brought visceral shame and terrible pain.

Just like throwing that slab of clay on the pottery wheel and doing it again for the first time in twenty years. Failing. So terribly. Knowing what I want it to be, but falling so far short it filled my body with terror. But in the mess of clay, the form bent and broken and misshaped, I held in the tears, took deep breaths and slowly scooped it up—bit by bit.

And I tried again. And failed. And again. And failed.

Realizing that this represented exactly where I am right now. Making something of a mess of clay and water and life. Crafting something with my own hands, having been so far removed from this act—existing as a person felt so long ago. So I am learning to do it again.

From nothingness and mess—the clay and the trying—making something beautiful.

With so much love,

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a trauma informed mental health and artistic publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to find truth, humanity, and healing. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly— and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Dear Reader,

It’s been a few weeks and I have been thinking about you in the betweens—movements that hover and pass and linger.

I wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it and if I had the energy to say anything at all. Worry and doubt clouds and paralyzes.

We moved.

Across states. To the West.

Packing up a 2500 square foot house with only two sets of bare hands, loading it, driving it, and unloading again—with two small children. And we severely underestimated the metaphorical mountain we would need to climb to make that happen. It pushed us far past the limits we believed we could handle. And nearly broke me.

I have been struggling minute-by-minute with the worst flare-up since I’ve first dealt with this chronic pain two years ago. My body has hurt so badly, and the fatigue and exhaustion seemingly has devoured life itself for me these past few weeks.

In the midst of it all, my grandfather passed away as well and I couldn’t attend the funeral.

A few days ago, I sat down with a chalk board and sketched out the mountainside I saw out our windows—a hauntingly beautiful cascade of rock and stone and awe-inspiring magnificence, which included Pike’s Peak in the fading sun.

Above the mountains in small letters, I wrote ‘We’re Here’. We made it. Fourteen months of planning, years of yearning, countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears and we are here.

I have finally escaped the prairie. For me, a land whose soil was made of blood. A land I died trying to belong to. A land I gave and gave and gave to. All the pieces of me until I broke too much to put myself back together again. I had to begin anew.

And yet I instantly belong here so high in the mountains. Above the clouds. On a solo hike a few months ago, I paused and took in the mountains towering before me—countless layers of blue and green and mist—and bent down to take a handful of the granite filled soil. I felt a centering then that I have never felt before. That all was right in the world. Despite all the suffering and all the pain. I could die here and it would be okay. I wept at the revelation.

And wished that all women and all humans who had endured such terrible trauma and abuse could find this feeling. A feeling of belonging. Of home. Of protection and nurturing. Of a complete and total safety nothing else in the world could rock. Not even death.

I found it on the mountainside. In the wild. All alone. Yet not alone at all.

Substack moving forward

Before these past few weeks, and before this summer in particular, I have had a definitive schedule with Substack. I treated it like a professional publication. And like an oiled cog in a machine—which would be “optimal”. I didn’t mean to do it this way. It was just a natural outcome of how I ran my blog many years ago. A blog that gave me and my family a full-time income. Where I took “elite” year long bogging classes that cost a fortune and traveled around the country.

A writing path that was successful in the before. Before I ended up in the hospital facing my end. Before the chronic pain took over. Before when hustle culture and religion and patriarchy ruled my life. Where the prairie and the promise of “the good life” consumed me whole.

If you’ve stuck with me this far, thank you.

You are witnessing a pivot in this publication and in me.

I’ve been thinking of you and thinking of this publication so much and wondering how to move forward with it. And as I got dressed this morning, thinking and thinking, I realized several things.

One of them was how truly deep and total Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder goes—the diagnosis I was labeled with by a psychologist in the hospital who worked extensively with war veterans. And how deep this thing goes for those of us who endured the trauma so completely and thoroughly in childhood.

It’s something I don’t think most people realize. It’s something I don’t even realize most of the time—the fact that my identity was never allowed to develop. That my identity was so throughly broken from me and physically beaten out of me—forced to merge with my abuser’s for safety. For worth. For any resemblance of love.

People laugh and joke about their childhood—visiting friends. Going to prom. Driving in their new cars. I never had any of those things. I was confined to my room with my books and lined paper and pencil. Those things became my friends. And the birds outside my windows. The prairie. My writing.

This means most people, when they looked at a display of candies in childhood, they likely could pick out a favorite. I did not have this ability. When asked of a favorite color, most people might leaned a certain way. Or could pick at least something. To do this you reach within and you grasp something. My something had been thoroughly severed. I had no sense of self. No self protection. No self knowledge. This part of me, kept like an infant so I could be controlled in every way.

I couldn’t remember facts and dates and people’s names. Because this required one to hold onto it. Compare it to other things you know. You had to be a person to assign value to something or a group of things. I could not. Even today, I struggle with this. The worst is orientation. I am directionally challenged and can’t remember which ways to turn even when I’ve lived in a location for many years.

All this to say, my identity is only a couple of years old. Beginning to be formed in bits after I broke and found myself in the hospital. I’ve learned to allow myself to love the color pink. To face the terror of decisions. Even with color. Because when I was a child, to have opinions was to have pain. To have visceral shame—pain. Loneliness. A rejection so complete, that being nothing and suffering was the only thing that assigned my existence value.

I did this with Substack.

I outsourced myself.

And in a way, many of us do this with jobs. We have to. We live in a society where we have to make money to live. But this is different for those of us who have CPTSD from childhood trauma. It’s different for those of us who are survivors. Giving of ourselves means something incredibly significant. Because this act was shaped by all encompassing trauma. A complete breaking of the mind, body and soul. To become nothing so someone else could have everything. A closing in of our existence so that our breaths could continue with each passing second— for our heart to keep beating even when our grasp of self has long gone. Like the glazed eyes of a deer being fed on alive by a pack of wolves.

I wasn’t making very much money with Substack, at least not nearly what I made with blogging. But I held on because I made some amazing friends here and connected with the most beautiful community and women. Women communicated, sometimes in tears how much this publication impacted them. And it was changing me too. The words pouring from my fingertips onto this page somehow felt like they had a life of their own. Creating. Birthing. Living. Breathing. Changing.

But there were some small problems that grew too large to avoid.

The writing, editing and publishing was taking every space ounce of time I had. Even when I brought it down to one newsletter a week. The commitment of one Tuesday newsletter a week—and then a personalized letter for my dear paid readers on Sundays, was taking a terrible tole on me.

Then the men showed up.

They said the worst things imaginable. They stalked me. I blocked and blocked. But some made new profiles to stalk me more. I didn’t sign up for Substack for this. Especially when I came on here on Substack to heal, to grow, to connect—at a time in my life where I was in the midst of a great breaking and rebuilding.

Never in my life have I had men say the things they have here to me on Substack. This brought up terrible memories of my childhood. Terrible conditioning and trauma from men that I’ve experienced in my life. And my “fight or flight” well conditioned response initiated: become invisible.

“Be no one.”

“That is the only way to be safe.”

A well-worn response to the twenty years of childhood abuse I suffered. A well-worn response to the lifetime of abuse I’ve faced at the hands of men.

Outsourcing. Terrible comments and stalking from men. And then a pause from writing. We moved. I got sick. And then I didn’t write. I didn’t quite know how to put it all into words. And then I didn’t write another Sunday and then another Sunday—the gap in writing eating at me, each week.

What would I do?

A new beginning

I told myself to do Substack full out for a year and I did that in a way that I thought was best. And I think it is if you are going to grow a business. My next steps needed to be what I did with the blog—classes, and growing to other forms of media like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook—even an external blog. But I’ve done that before. I was that person. I’m not anymore. Or at least, I am not right now.

I left blogging cold turkey when COVID hit. It was too much. My list had grown to over 50,000. My blog had thousands of visitors a day. Hundreds of thousands a month.

I felt like I could no longer run it like a machine. My life was too messy. I had a three month old, a toddler and a husband who had become a raging addict. I had been all alone and in so much pain and I left everything that meant anything to me. Writing included.

I am facing a similar upheaval.

My life has completely changed in the past few weeks.

But this time, I am not leaving.

Not writing anyway. This art form is far too precious to me and the work we’ve done here at Wildflowers Grow has grown far beyond me.

But I’m not doing it like before. I can’t anymore. At least not in the season I currently find myself. I am not outsourcing myself. I will be writing as an extension of myself.

Truer. Rawer. More authentic. And when I choose to. Not on a calendar. I’ll have to change all the presets and the promises. That might come as a surprise and a disappointment to some. That’s okay. Because we’re doing this messy and wild from now on.

Less edited. Less perfect. More human.

I think that’s so needed right now in the sweeping and looming tide of AI. Its shadow is long and it’s darkening all of our worlds. Especially artists. I wont go into that because that’s a whole other post. But in the midst of this, I’ve realized that if an artist uses AI, they will rise to the top. I’ve been in business long enough and I am neurodivergent enough to read the patterns. I’ve watched publications here I know that are heavily AI, begin and rise to tens of thousands of subscribers in a month’s time while those little check marks appear on their profiles.

I’ve decided not to be swept up in it. Right now, with what I am dealing with in life and who I am becoming, I am choosing to continue to just write.

And create. Messy. Full of errors. Imperfectly. Real.

And I’ve begun to paint again. That’s a life changing thing. I signed up for a pottery class this week. It was the first time I had been around adults in a social setting like that in nearly two years. I had a full out panic attack in the car afterwards. But I knew I needed to do it. And keep doing it. I knew I needed to face the raw, painful, messy parts of myself creatively and start over again. Right in the rubble. The mess. The failure. I need to face it again. In this place.

I suppose that’s what I am doing right now too—with this letter to you.

Failing. Disappointing. Not doing things the way I “should” or how others expect. As I looked in the mirror yesterday, I realized that I needed to do this more. “Maybe,” I said aloud as I washed the day’s grit from my face and looked at my dripping eyes in the reflection, “You need to practice disappointing people.”

And I smiled. A smile that reached the depths of myself—to that place that was so thoroughly severed before. A place where a few strands are beginning to grow.

I will loose subscribers.

This publication might not ever earn anything substantial—not like my blog at least.

The effort I put in and all the hours will not turn around and help me pay the grocery bill or the ever increasing medical bills. But it will do something else.

It will heal me. And hopefully it will help heal you too.

Hopefully it will gift beauty, and honesty and life in any measure it can. I am releasing myself from earning with this publication. I am releasing myself from the way our patriarchal society expects publications to run. I am releasing myself from anyone’s exceptions. Especially for how I write.

I am going to do this wild.

With so much love,

P.S./an additional and important note:

The Lindsay Clancy trial is wrecking me. As I am sure it is for so many women and survivors who are following this trial—willingly or not (because it’s all over my social media). I woke up throughout the night having dreams of my own children strangled in the same way. I have cried watching this. Cried for all the women in this system who are being so completely and utterly failed. And blamed. Our patriarchal society is so entirely broken and women and children suffer at the bottom of that pyramid—with white billionaires at the top leaching from all those below. It sickens me to my very core.

This is a reality that only the oppressed know and we know it to the fabric of our being. The pain is engrained in our flesh and the oppressors point fingers at us. They say we are to blame. And we are the ones who are expected to keep holding it all. All while they are so blind to the system that are withholding and to the pain they are inflicting.

No matter the outcome of this trial. Or the new devastating thing that the president does that reminds women and survivors of this reality—this pain made real—

I am comforting myself with one thing: I can trust the feminine wild. Like what I felt in the mountains on that hike. I can trust the ground beneath me and my connection to it. My own power. It’s power. Each other’s power. Like wildflowers growing where we are planted—enduring great storms like this one, our roots intertwined for strength.

This world and all its pains and beauty and events will come and go. They will wash over you and I.

And we will remain.

Tethered to the wild.

In its feminine embrace.

With love and protection for ourselves. Filling all the places within us that the world broke. Making us whole again. And overflowing into the broken places of those around us. Little by little.

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a trauma informed mental health and artistic publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to find truth, humanity, and healing. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly— and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Dearest Reader,

In two weeks we move our whole life over seven hundred miles west. A place where we know no one. A place we have only visited a handful of times.

Leaving my seven-year-old’s soul friend she has had for three years.

Leaving my husband’s recovery group and church.

Leaving our first home. The home we raised our small children in. With its one hundred and twenty-year-old original wood floors, expansive arches, and hand-carved fireplaces.

Leaving my friend cardinal who sings his song on the telephone wire in our backyard to begin and end the day.

And leaving a place so full of trauma memories for me, I feel I have scarcely been able to breathe here.

Moving to Colorado was once a far-out dream. I felt like I couldn’t do it because I was the only one suffering here. My husband had support, and my children loved their school and their friends. So I prioritized their happiness and made this dream small. Like so many mothers and women do, I put the needs of others first.

But what I slowly realized in that span of time was that I was making my needs optional—dismissing them—while validating the needs of my two small children and my husband.

You would think that finally chasing a dream like this would feel exciting. That the only emotions waiting on the other side would be joy and anticipation.

But trauma has a funny way of changing how we experience hope.

A few days ago, I was sitting in the eye doctor’s office when the technician asked what I had planned for the week.

“I’m packing for our move to Colorado,” I replied.

“Aren’t you excited?” she asked, her face full of confusion.

Her question caught me off guard. Had my face not shown excitement? No. It had shown fear. Grief.

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Dearest Reader,

Learned helplessness.

This is an incredibly central phrase to my healing journey. And one that I would continue to understand as I walked this path—like an onion slowly peeling back layers of understanding. This last few weeks, another layer was peeled back. A big one. This is something that survivors can struggle with, especially with the state of the nation and the challenges we face right now in our economy and in our own personal lives. I sure have this summer.

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Dearest Reader,

It’s the day after the Fourth of July here in the US. And to tell you the truth, I had a hard time with it yesterday.

We attended a classic Midwest celebration in a small town—one we’ve been going to for years. But this town does it so big that, in 1979, it was designated “America’s Official Fourth of July City—Small Town USA” by resoluti…

Read more

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I was seven years old and alone in the mountains.

A wild babbling brook became my playground. In a matter of minutes, it transformed into my home. My safety. My joy. My friend.

I marveled at its crystal clear depths. I had never before seen water so transparent. I knew then that it must be magic. Especially when the golden mountain light sparkled on its surface.

My life held so much challenge then—far too much for a little girl. But there, in that magic place, I was free. No rules. No belt. No expectations. No heart-racing. No fear. I had left a life shaped by high-control religion, purity culture and patrichary—systems that demanded my complete obedience. Systems that took everything from me, and required me to be a vessel—supply for the nearest man in charge.

But there in the crystal clear water and the wild mountain air, I had found a different world. A fairy brook with tiny fish friends, curious babbling sounds, and birds singing in the brush. Rocks that had been there for an age, and had formed themselves out of the land. Soil that had seen more life and death beyond what I could imagine. I felt safe in the midst of all that wild and chaos. Held. Peaceful.

Memories like these beckon me to return to that smiling little girl in nature. To her freedom. To her love and light and joy.

To her rewilding.

For many women—and especially survivors of abuse—rewilding is the quiet work of shedding the conditioning that taught us to abandon ourselves and remembering the instincts, intuition, and voice that were always ours.

And right now, so many women, and especially survivors of abuse—have begun to realize something difficult.

That our world’s promises of “happiness” were beautifully painted walls, “freedom”was a glass ceiling, and the space to breathe in our box had long begun closing inward.

Patriarchy’s Gilded Tradwife Cage

The deeper I step into feminine rewilding—and embracing that free, loved and joyful inner child beside the mountain stream—the more I find myself thinking about the promises I was taught. The promises patriarchy makes to women.

On the surface, most women deeply desire these what these promises offer and what the patriarchy (and Christian Nationalism like Turning Point USA) is selling. We want comfort. Security. Protection. Love.

Their promises cater to our absolute deepest desires as women. To be seen. To be loved. To be witnessed. To be cared for. Like we have been killing ourselves doing for others since we were old enough to understand how to be pleasing to our caregivers. Conditioned to hold it all. Wouldn’t it be so beautiful if someone finally held us? Maybe then—finally—that weight wouldn’t be so crushing anymore. And the lack we were conditioned to be so ashamed of—our feminine shortcomings—would finally be made up for when we find a man.

The patriarchy creates a problem and promises a solution for women, all while feeding on them. It packages these promises in the most beautiful wrapping. Promising the childhood things so many little girls desired. Soft dresses. Flowers in our hair. Fresh bread. Smiling children. Fresh baked cookies. A lovely garden. A slower pace of life. A husband who provides. A home that feels safe and orderly. Warm. Full of love. Safety. Looking at these images online, it is easy to understand why so many women are drawn to them. I understand because there was a time where I was drawn to them too.

I followed the tradwife playbook to the letter, but as time went on, I began to notice something unsettling. The promise of safety came with conditions attached. The protection required obedience. The belonging required self-suppression. The security depended upon remaining within a carefully defined role. The walls of the cage seemed beautiful, but in the end bars came with these empty promises.

A recent study reveals this very idea so vividly. It examined husband’s attitudes towards their tradwifes. Researchers expected that men’s attraction to their wives would be rooted primarily in what psychologists call benevolent sexism—the belief that women should be protected, cared for, and provided for by men.

In other words, they expected the appeal to be rooted in chivalry.

Instead, they found something far more unsettling.

The strongest predictor of whether a man viewed the tradwife lifestyle favorably was not benevolent sexism at all, but hostile sexism—openly negative attitudes toward women and beliefs that women exist in competition with men or should remain beneath them. Even the researchers admitted they were surprised by the finding.

But women who have lived that life and women and survivors of abuse, know. And I think this is the very reason we don’t see any middle aged tradwife influencers.

(You can read a little more about my story of being an ex-tradwife in last week’s article: Women Are Not Exhausted Because We’re “The Weaker Sex”)

Soon, these women will realize what so many tradwives have experienced—what I realized shortly after twenty-six hours of labor and leaving my career. When I came home in postpartum underwear a day later and everyone continued to expect me to serve them. When I stayed up countless nights alone, crying because the dream I was spun was so different than the reality I was experiencing.

Ever so slowly, insidiously the patriarchy expects not just our labor, our looks, our submission, but also our personhood. It asks women to place their instincts, intuition, desires, ambitions, and identities second to the needs of the system around them—especially to the most powerful men. It expects women to shape ourselves into something useful. Something manageable. Something that keeps the machine running smoothly.

It expects us to be The Giving Tree. Giving pieces of ourselves for men to be happy. Giving in hopes that it will be exchanged someday for love.

As someone who grew up within high-control religion and purity culture, I can see now how deeply this message shaped me. I was taught that my value was found in what I could do for others. My safety depended on compliance. My goodness depended on self-sacrifice.

The more disconnected I became from myself, the more approval I received.

The Wild Feminine and the path to freedom

If patriarchy asks women to trade pieces of themselves for safety, then the wild feminine is the opposite: the slow and often uncomfortable process of shedding external dependence on man-made systems and returning inward, to our true selves.

For many women and abuse survivors, this path doesn’t usually come in grand sweeping event, a dramatic rebellion against society, or a complete rejection of the traditional family system, partnership, motherhood, or community—though it can. But more often, it begins in the tiniest loose threads. A growing discomfort with the roles we were taught to play—the unraveling becoming noticeable, until the realization is not so quiet anymore. The pain is too great. And the promises, having unraveled so thoroughly, are no longer wearable.

The first few threads might be quiet whispers, “There has to be more than this.” Or, “Is this pain worth it?” Maybe even, “How long do I tolerate and absorb this pain in my life?”

It might even be a feeling that somewhere along the way, we became disconnected from joy. That our tears could fill the little rivers we played in as an child. Our dreams. Our essence—all the things that used to make us smile as children, somehow had all melted away. When did we lose so much of ourselves?

The wild feminine is not a perfectly curated lifestyle on social media (unlike the tradwife lifestyle). It is something so much older and deeper—set in the foundations of our world. Something we knew so instinctively as children. Something our native ancestors and many women before us knew.

It’s intuition. Instinct. Creativity. Curiosity. It’s the ability to trust ourselves.

For many women and survivors, these are the very things we were taught to distrust.

Instead, we were encouraged to look outward. To authority. To institutions. To husbands. To pastors. To experts. To anyone who might tell us who we should be and how we should live. So we shaped ourselves to survive within these systems. But over time, many of us became disconnected from our own inner knowing. We learned to override our discomfort. We learned to ignore our instincts. We learned to silence the small voice inside us in order to belong.

Again, we have studies that prove this cost, and how this disconnection from self affects us in adulthood.

Researchers studying self-determination theory have found that autonomy is one of the fundamental human needs required for wellbeing. Read that again.

Human beings thrive when they experience agency, self-direction, and the freedom to make meaningful choices about their own lives. Likewise, trauma researchers have long observed that healing often involves reconnecting to the body, rebuilding trust in one’s own perceptions, and learning to recognize internal signals that were once ignored or suppressed.

Rewilding sets women free

None of these studies on self-determination theory or the findings of trauma researchers surprises me, because when I think back to that little girl standing beside a mountain stream, what strikes me most is how naturally she trusted herself. She followed curiosity. She wandered. She explored. She listened. She paid attention to the world around her and the world within her. No one had yet convinced her that she needed permission to exist.

And I am learning more and more how the wild feminine lives in that space.

It is the part of us that knows who we are beneath the conditioning. The part that remains connected to instinct, intuition, creativity, wonder, and truth. It is not concerned with whether a woman chooses a career or motherhood, a garden or a boardroom, a mountain trail or a suburban neighborhood.

Inside the world I came from was another story entirely. It was a world shaped by control. A world where girls learned early that belonging often came at a cost. We were taught to be pleasing. To be useful. To make ourselves smaller. To shape our lives around the needs, desires, and expectations of others.

But beside that mountain stream, none of those rules existed.

The older I get, the more I realize that what so many women are searching for is not rebellion, but freedom. Not freedom from family, community, commitment, or responsibility, but freedom from the endless expectation that our lives exist primarily in service to others. Freedom from the belief that our worth must be earned through usefulness, productivity, beauty, obedience, or self-sacrifice.

This is what rewilding has come to mean for me. It is the slow return to the self beneath the conditioning. A remembering of who we were before the world told us who we needed to be. A reclaiming of instincts, intuition, and desires that were often dismissed, shamed, or ignored.

Patriarchy teaches women to look outward for their value. It encourages us to seek approval, validation, and identity through the external world. Rewilding invites us inward. It asks us to trust ourselves again. To become curious about who we are when no one else is defining us. To listen to the quiet voice beneath the noise.

Perhaps this is why so many women find themselves drawn to forests, mountains, gardens, birds, herbalism, slow living, and the quiet rhythms of nature. To slow living. To free living. To an independent lifestyle, free from patriarchal constraints and expectations. Not because these things are inherently feminine, but because nature operates according to entirely different rules than the systems we were raised within.

A wildflower does not justify its existence. A mountain does not earn its worth. A river does not hustle for its value. The wild asks nothing to prove itself. It simply exists according to its nature. A peaceful chaos. An acceptance of life and love and what is.

For centuries, women have been taught that their highest purpose was to serve the systems around them. To be useful. To be consumed. To become batteries powering a world that often measures human value through productivity, achievement, and sacrifice. The wild feminine offers another possibility. A life where worth is inherent. A life where intuition is trusted. A life where joy, rest, creativity, and presence are not rewards earned after exhaustion, but essential parts of being alive.

I think this is why so many women are returning to the forest. Not necessarily the literal forest, though many of us are doing that too. We are returning to the parts of ourselves that were once wild. The parts that knew who we were before the conditioning. Before the fear. Before the cage.

And perhaps that is why it feels so threatening to patriarchal systems. Because a woman who trusts herself becomes much harder to control.

Because rewilding is not about becoming someone new.

It is about remembering who we were all along.

Its only concern is that the choice belongs to her.

Upgrade, become a paying reader and receive Wildflowers Grow Weekly

A personalized Sunday letter for women and abuse survivors

Paying readers receive a weekly, personalized Sunday letter from me and can include extras like this week’s post two days early, a sneak peak at what articles are next, a poll to vote on the next essays, and always—encouraging words for what’s going on in our world.

This summer, because as our nation and life has felt heavier and more worrisome—I have made it a priority to write and send these weekly Sunday newsletters for paying readers. I wanted a special place for women to go to and receive encouragement and hope at the start of each week.

You can find previous Sunday emails (as well as other paid articles) in the private bookshelf for paid readers here.

Your membership also unlocks access to a library of resources in The Wildflower Library, and previous issues in print in The Wildflowers Grow Weekly collection.

Your contribution also supports this publication’s mission of amplifying the light in the voices of women and survivors of abuse, including my own: a feminine outcry that seeks to defend the marginalized, honor human dignity, and carry a message of value, safety, and love into the world.

Upgrade by clicking on the button below:

Subscribe now

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly— and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Dearest Reader,

This week I withdrew.

It felt like Trump’s arrogant face was all over my social media. So much about the reflecting pool. I saw the videos and thought: Now people will see. People will finally see through his lies. There’s no denying it now.

But I forgot…

that men like him do not play by nature’s rules. They remove our eyes and our ears an…

Read more

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I remember being on the floor of the hospital bathroom. The tile was cold against my face, but I scarcely regarded it as the panic came in waves throughout my body.

I gasped to breathe, but air would not come. I am going to die in here. And no one is coming. No one has ever come.

Pain. Terrible loneliness. Dread.

It permeated every pore of reality I knew—and sunk in deeper than any physical knife could. I was at the dark bottom of the ocean again. With no way to know which way was up. The pressure crushing my lungs. The loneliness gripping my soul.

A fellow patient ran in and took my hand, guiding me through box breathing. I remember very little, except sitting in the psychologist’s office for an hour again afterwards.

My whole life I had been taught to be a blank canvas for the world to use at their bidding, especially men.

I was always taught that women were “the weaker sex”. And not to be trusted because we gave Adam the apple. Because of this, we owed men everything—a lifetime of servitude due to our original sin. And the best women made up for this by sacrificing all of themselves—the more their suffering, the bigger their badge of honor.

And so I sacrificed. And sacrificed. And gave and gave.

Women are expected to sacrifice like The Giving Tree and be happy

I became The Giving Tree.

Do you remember this children’s book? I cried when it was read to me as a child. I cried again as I looked it up for this article.

The boy played in her branches and she loved him. But never realized that she was just an object to him. No matter what she gave, the boy would never see her.

So she gave in order to make him happy. She did what women were taught to do: give parts of ourselves because this was our role—to make men happy. Exchange parts of ourselves because then they will be happy and in turn, we will be happy.

She gave…

Her apples because he wasn’t happy to see her, but wanted money.

Her branches, because he wasn’t happy to see her, but wanted to build a house.

Her trunk, because he wasn’t happy to see her, but wanted to build a boat to sail away and “be happy.”

Here are words from near the end of the book:

“Cut down my trunk

And make a boat,”

Said the tree.

“Then you can sail away…

And be happy.”

And so the boy cut down her trunk

And made a boat and sailed away.

And the tree was happy…

But not really.

And there was nothing left of her.

Nothing left to give. But the boy, now a man, never saw. He never saw her as anything deserving of his love. Never saw her as anything other than an object to be taken from. So she gave simply to see him happy. Then she would be happy. But not really…

Yet no matter how much she gave, he never loved her.

No matter how much she gave, he was never happy. Even in the end of the book when he was old and near the end of his life.

This is how so many little girls were taught to be. Especially girls raised in Christian homes.

Give up all the pieces of yourself. Then you will be happy. And when there is nothing left to give, and you are a stump in the ground—you still can be used and you will be happy. Giving to men. Being used as an object for men.

And so I gave like I was conditioned to give.

Until one day having been violated in every way I possibly could, my mind and body broke. I was a stump in the ground—but I was not happy like I had been told I would be. And then in that dark, lonely place all the memories of my childhood and what I was taught to owe others—taught to deny—flooded through my system.

Like Pandora’s box.

Dissasciation, they called it. It was like being one of those wraiths from the movie “Soul”. Void of life. Empty. Gone.

But I had been like that for years. My mind just finally couldn’t do it anymore.

So all my light finally flickered out.

A death of the soul.

Women have been conditioned for lifetimes to sacrifice pieces of themselves on the alter of male ego

So are women the “weaker sex”? Or have we been conditioned to believe we are, and to give all of ourselves for lifetimes in the hopes of being seen as more than an object? In the hopes that someday we would be given our humanity? Witnessed, loved for who we are. Our existence validated.

While all along, we were giving away the very thing we desired most. Our humanity. Our strength. Our power. Our identity.

Exchanging it. Because we were told this came from a man.

Not from within ourselves.

And we had it all along.

Like Glenda told Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, “You’ve always had the power my dear. You just had to learn it for outsell.”

Our patriarchal society is positioned in a way where we’ve been taught men are the wizards of Oz—we just need to go to them and they will fix everything. But as so many of us have reached midlife and beyond, we have seen the man behind the curtain and we have begun to recognize the lies for what they are.

Days prior to being admitted to the hospital and my mental collapse, I sat across from a pastor at my church (a retired psychologist) and poured out my heart. I told him how I gave and I gave and I gave. To my children. To my husband. To my family. To my church. To my bible study women’s group.

“I feel like I can’t do it anymore.” I cried.

He nodded and praised me for all that I was suffering for. Praised me for what I was giving.

“You are doing exactly the right thing. Keep doing it,” He said, “Paul gave his life too.”

And proceeded to quote the bible when Paul was in jail ‘suffering for his faith’.

His words curdled in my stomach.

I replied softly—my eyes downcast, “But Paul wanted that. He chose to give his life. What if I don’t want this? I don’t feel like I have any choice. And I don’t want this anymore.”

He looked at me sternly and said, “What did you expect from this session? What do you want me to tell you?”

“I don’t know. You’re the psychologist,” I responded, my voice shaking.

He smiled—the mask I knew so well in this church—the “do your duty” smile. The “fall in line soldier” smile. The “everything’s all good” smile.

“Then like I said, keep doing what you are doing. You’re doing great.”

I left that session with a lump in the pit of my stomach. If I was doing “everything right” then why did I secretly wish that a semi would hit me when I was driving? Why was suicidal ideation becoming harder and harder to tamper down? Why was the only time I felt peace when I thought those thoughts?

“This life is the saint’s hell—and the sinner’s heaven. The next life will be the saint’s heaven—and the sinner’s hell.”

This was quoted at me more than I can remember. Suffering for women was a badge of honor. It meant we were doing what we were meant to do.

But how come it was only the women?

My life was a long road to recovery after that two-week hospital stay. I slowly left the church. Slowly faded from friend groups. Found Substack and writing again. And realized so slowly how I was brainwashed to have zero sense of agency. Zero sense of self. My identity was stolen from me—never able to grow. Groomed to be a cog in a machine. A female battery to power the Christian nationalist and patriarchal machine.

What women have endured and how we are stronger than men

When my husband, who was struggling with a porn addiction, went to therapy with me early in our marriage—I was told I owed him anything he needed to help him overcome his sin. His sin was laid completely on my shoulders. The Christian therapist pulled out the Bible and told me it was my duty to give my husband sex whenever he wanted it. To submit. And to be silent about it.

“Why is that a problem for you?” The therapist asked—her gaze condescending. Clearly I was the reason he was sinning. I was to blame because I wasn’t fulfilling my wifely duties.

I was taught that there was something fundamentally wrong with me (cue Eve making Adam sin by giving him the apple), and that I needed to give of myself in order to make up for this. And that this was my place—I was only completed by a man. Because I was made from merely the rib of a man. Just a small part of him. My job was to fill in that part of him I took. That he was missing. And that was my fault for being made too.

But after that hospital stay, I began questioning everything I knew. Leaving the religion that had killed me. Leaving friends and groups of people that took everything from me. Leaving the idea that women must be weaker and submissive to men. It was that or end back up in the hospital.

And I began to learn new things about myself and my fellow women that had always been kept from me or twisted.

Women have spent centuries being told they are weaker than men, yet even basic statistics tell a different story. Researchers studying resilience have found that women often respond to stress not only through fight-or-flight, but through what psychologists call “tend-and-befriend”—building relationships, community, and cooperation as a means of survival. In addition, women are more likely to survive famine, disease, and other extreme hardships.

And according to a Harvard study, women are better leaders, scoring higher than men in emotional intelligence, compassion, mentoring, and inclusive decision-making. They are also widely credited with superior performance during times of crisis.

When I think about the women in my life, I don’t think of weakness. I think of incredible strength despite all odds. Adaptation. Endurance. I think of women carrying grief, trauma, caregiving, and impossible emotional loads while still finding ways to nurture life around them.

Women I know, are some of the strongest human beings I’ve ever met.

I believe the world has often mistaken domination for strength. Especially with MAGA and the manosphere as part of our culture today. But sheer determination and perseverance through the worst of storms is its own kind of reverent power.

And women have been proving that for generations.

Conclusion—Women everywhere are setting down the patriarchy’s expectations

…and embracing their own individual power and humanity.

So, I was always told that women were exhausted because we were the weaker sex. That we were more emotional and couldn’t handle near as much as men. That we were so flawed, that men needed to take charge. Women “needed” men and that was their place. In the family unit. To caregive the family and produce children.

But the reality I’ve become to understand is not that we are the weaker sex, but we are exhausted because we’ve been carrying the invisible weight of everyone else’s emotions, needs, and comfort for lifetimes. We were conditioned. Brain washed. Beat. Broken. To hold it all.

Like The Giving Tree.

“Society’s shock absorbers” Gabor Mate had said.

And I realize now that whenever I feel shame in my body and act out of the idea that I “owe” someone something—a smile, emotionally regulating words, parts of myself…that in reality, I don’t owe anyone anything anymore.

And further, that I do not need to live my life beneath a man’s fears, and insecurities. That my worth is not equal to how much I submit, and cower, and shut down so he can feel bigger, and stronger.

Even if all the world didn’t love me anymore because I stopped giving it parts of myself, I would be okay.

Because finally, for the first time in my thirty-eight years…I can love myself.

And I can distance myself from the people in my life who saw me solely for what I could do for them—how I could be useful to them.

And I think what men and this patriarchal society doesn’t realize is that when you’ve beaten and broken women for lifetimes, they grow stronger and stronger. Their power greater and greater.

Until one day it bursts forth.

And women all find their power.

Collectively.

Upgrade, become a paying reader and receive Wildflowers Grow Weekly

A personalized Sunday letter for women and abuse survivors

Paying readers receive a weekly, personalized Sunday letter from me and can include extras like this week’s post two days early, a sneak peak at what articles are next, a poll to vote on the next essays, and always—encouraging words for what’s going on in our world.

This summer, because as our nation and life has felt heavier and more worrisome—I have made it a priority to write and send these weekly Sunday newsletters for paying readers. I wanted a special place for women to go to and receive encouragement and hope at the start of each week.

You can find previous Sunday emails (as well as other paid articles) in the private bookshelf for paid readers here.

Your membership also unlocks access to a library of resources in The Wildflower Library, and previous issues in print in The Wildflowers Grow Weekly collection.

Your contribution also supports this publication’s mission of amplifying the light in the voices of women and survivors of abuse, including my own: a feminine outcry that seeks to defend the marginalized, honor human dignity, and carry a message of value, safety, and love into the world.

Upgrade by clicking on the button below:

Subscribe now

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly— and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Dearest Reader,

Today is Father’s Day and for so many women and survivors, this is a hard day. I am included in that camp.

I saw a funny reel on Instagram that featured a raging-out mom in a bathrobe singing a screamo song about how every day is Father’s Day while she did all-the-things around the house. And I laughed—but it’s not really funny, because …

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Green flag men, written by women, are having a moment.

And suddenly, bare-minimum decency doesn’t feel quite so romantic anymore.

Perhaps for the first time, many women are seeing themselves reflected in relationships built on safety instead of survival.

This week, I watched one of these shows—one that has generated an incredible amount of buzz, especially among therapists.

If you can look past the cliché man-and-woman meat scenes in Amazon’s new summer series Off Campus, buried beneath them is something much more interesting: characters written by the therapy generation, and by a woman who gets it.

I was hesitant to watch it at first. It didn’t seem like my cup of tea. But what I found surprised me.

After finishing the show, I found a centeredness that I hadn’t felt before. An acceptance of who I was. A quiet understanding that I deserved love and respect because of my inherent worth—not for what I could do for others. Not for my appearance. Not for who I knew, how much money I made, or what clothes I wore.

But simply because I exist.

And that realization has lingered in my mind this week. Because these fictional “green flag” men and women have also received their fair share of criticism. Many people ask: Is this realistic?

For a long time, I was in that camp too. And so many women still are—understandably. Many women have far more evidence of the harm men can do than examples of healthy masculinity.

The treatment women are accustomed to receiving from men

A fellow feminist, in a reply to one of my recent articles, said something like this: “so basically what you are saying in this entire article is women want to be treated like equals.”

Big whoop. Revolutionary. Cue the sarcasm.

But as I’ve written article after article about statistical violence against women and women’s experiences in the patriarchal structure we live within, I’ve come to truly see this one revolutionary idea: the meaning of equality is not obvious even to most people.

You know why?

Because of the absolutely horrific comments I’ve received by men—that prove the very topics I write about. I’ve been called every name in the books. Told “it would be easy to break you.” One man made several new accounts in order to harass me with some of the worst language I’ve ever experienced.

Just from voicing the experience of women who have endured abuse.

So the argument isn’t simply “women wanted to be treated like equals” and suddenly green flag men pop out, because that requires a healthy man to treat a woman in a healthy way. Meaning, that most men don’t understand the concept of what it means to treat women like equals. And many women sadly…were never taught that their worth was seperate than men’s approval and comfort. Being treated like equals, is learned. By both parties.

(You can read a little more about this topic in my writing here: What Women Want—And Why Most Men Don’t Know)

It requires women to feel safe enough to say things like, “that doesn’t work for me.” and “You can’t treat me like that.” But for so many of us, the journey to those phrases is long and full of violence and harassment towards us from men. It requires safety, building self worth through understanding what that means, and value of ourselves—apart from what we can produce for men.

But the deck feels stacked against us, because patriarchy teaches men a very different scenario.

Women trying to climb their way to living a safe, centered life are fighting against an entire system—where finding self-safety, stability and good mental health can feel like a triggering uphill battle with no way to reach the top when men are involved.

Because in the system we live in, most men don’t understand that they are putting the expectation and blame entirely on us. We are being used like supply—batteries to power their comfort, their needs, their lives. Women are The Giving Tree…giving little pieces of ourselves without consent, until there is nothing left.

“If a man feels lonely, patriarchy often tells him the problem is women. If a man feels economically powerless, patriarchy tells him he has been robbed of the breadwinner status that was supposedly his birthright by women in the workplace. If a man feels sexually rejected, patriarchy tells him women have become too picky, too selfish, too feminist, too fat, too old, too educated, too ruined by cats, too busy voting, too unwilling to organize their lives around his emotional weather. If a man feels lost, patriarchy offers him a map where every road leads back to controlling women.”

—

Today, women feel like many men are not only conditioned to be blind to how women are treated (no matter what we say or how we say it), but they have such low self esteem and are so coddled and privileged—that there’s no way for many to see women as whole healthy human beings deserving of love and kindness and nurturing, separate from them.

In my opinion, many men can’t see beyond the pornographic object that serves them on their screen (especially those who orbit the manosphere).

And at the end of the day, what are so many women used to?

Being afraid of men.

Being stripped of our humanity.

Being seen as an extension of him—to be used for his bidding.

Many women were conditioned into submission and groomed to believe this was honorable and the biggest award went to the women who submitted the most. We were taught to fully center men. And men were taught this was what they deserved—and they were to enforce this treatment. With anger, with retribution, abuse, bullying…control. Herding their sheep back into their pen.

So women shrank. And we suffered. And we received the gold stars for being good girls in our pen.

And each gold star was a loss of our humanity.

Women communally are finding safety

But little by little, women are communally and individually banding together—realizing what being treated like an equal human being looks like. Because so many of never knew. And our nervous systems were wired to give of ourselves in exchange for safety.

Don’t be loud. Don’t say an opinion. Don’t be too good at something (never better than a man). Dance around issues. Make him feel comfortable at all times. Put a smile on for him. Look in a way that pleases him.

Many of us never knew what being loved…actually looked like.

We were conditioned, not loved. We were controlled, not loved. We were used, not loved.

And for many of us, women’s movements and women’s fiction began to enter the picture. We allowed ourselves light—just for us and not for him. And we hid it under our proverbial covers, knowing he would not approve. But bit-by-bit we began to find ourselves in the pages.

Green flag men and the strong, nurturing, powerful women they lifted up—together creating a fire that kindled hot for the both of them.

Green flag men—and what men written by women are revealing

The manosphere might equate this to their porn—“unrealistic”. But what it really is?

Safety

That’s it.

That’s what all these men written by women are showing us. Men who feel safe to women. Men who are centered, secure. Men who have self esteem, take accountability and who are emotionally intelligent. Men who don’t project their pain onto women, but recognize the pain within themselves, are introspective, brave and face it themselves.

Men who don’t have any problems supporting her power. In fact, her power turns him on. Her power and strength fuels him. Her power gives him life. That is one of the key ingredients of these green flag men.

And the only men who feel threatened by this article are not green flags. Because only a secure man understands and values the women in his life. Only a green flag man will hear the pain of women and not make it about them—but about understanding. Listening. Witnessing. Changing. Being an ally. Defending. Marching alongside her because he knows the history of violence towards women. He knows how women have suffered at the hands of men.

In the T.V. and book series Off Campus (which inspired this article), Hannah has a thing for two guys and it feels like a representation of green flag verses red flag men for all women.

Justin is sure of himself but guarded. She says that there’s something she can’t quite put a finger on. Like she can’t get past his barrier. Through their conversation, he makes jabs so micro—if you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t notice them. Corralling her. Mental barriers to put her in her place. Chisel away at her confidence, her strength, her choices…her freedom. She’s a butterfly he wants to capture for himself—to siphon for himself. And so many men are like this. So many men are taught this—“lock that down” “put a ring on it.” She ends up following her gut and not going out with him (yuuss queen).

On the other hand, Garett is a strong personality—but he is supportive, centered and not threatened at all when she jabs at him. He brings out her strength. Her fire. Her full self. He supports her interests. He polishes silverware in the background in one scene—watching what she’s doing and meeting a need without being asked. He needs her during one of the biggest games of their season, but halfway through she still isn’t answering his phone calls and texts. She told him she was going to be there. His response? Not “where were you”. But, “Are you okay?” All of his concern is given for her. Not for him. Not expecting her to serve him. Because he knew if she could be there, then she would have been. Trust. Respect. Understanding.

Yet these green flags men are not all fictional. After the show, I thought what many do: this just isn’t real. And then I watched the cast interviews and was blown away. I’m not sure I’ve ever witnessed such green flag energy from a group of people ever. The love and support for each other was crazy. I might say that I loved the interviews even more than the show. The cast’s dynamic is just that beautiful.

Men written by women are revealing something many of us have rarely experienced before: permission to be in our bodies. Permission to be our own people. Permission not to exchange our personhood for what we can do for men. And perhaps most of all, men who do not require women to abandon themselves in order to be loved.

Women will never be the same and how our expectations are changing

After watching Off Campus, I felt like witnessing these healthy relationships was like another onion peeled off of the understanding of my world. Even though I’ve been reading this genre for a year now—and I’ve been in therapy consistently for nineteen years this year.

Unfortunately, for so many millennial women—we are waking up to marriages and lives where who we were supposed to be, and the life we were supposed to live was already decided for us. Many of us are waking up in the middle of decade-long marriages, with small children and in the midst of a country-wide terror—with a president that triggers everything we know is wrong with men: the exploitation and violation and dehumanization we know so well. Because we’ve lived it at the hands of men.

Women will never be the same, because like wildflowers whos roots bind together for strength against the storms—we too are linking arms. Survivors and women everywhere are speaking out, standing up and finding safety in our gathering voices.

Because of this, women are now drawing lines in the sand. Our patriarchal society taught us where our tolerance should be. And that tolerance never included consent. And now through our words, and our linked arms and the fictional green flag men we write—we are finding our powerful center.

Our expectations have changed. We deserve green flag men. We deserve to be centered for ourselves, instead of centering men and loved for ourselves.

Green flag men are secure men. Centered men. Whole men. Healthy men. Who heal instead of harm. Who give instead of take. Who see us. Who witness us. Who seek to understand us, like we were trained to understand men our whole lives. Who take the responsibility so many little girls were taught to shoulder at too young of an age—a responsibility that crushed us, mind body and soul.

Conclusion—a green flag future

So green flag men, written by men—might have inspired this article, but it’s also safe to say women are communally waking up more and more to their center.

They are finding safety in their lives and together—enough to begin to grow their own sense of value, self-worth and self-love apart from men.

And this means a green flag future for both men and women. Because no longer do either have to have unhealthy attachments. Each can exist fully, beautifully and entirely on their own. Valued entirely on their own. Separate but together.

In the past, women were taught to center men and men understood from an early age that this was owed to them. If they did not receive this centering then it needed to be enforced. To corral women back in their places, to be used as supply for men’s comfort.

But through movements like feminism that fought so hard for equality for women, and the internet who brought like-minded women together communally, we are finding safety in each other. In our shared experiences. In our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Women are encouraging each other through all sorts of mediums, one of them being women’s fiction and “men written by women”.

More and more, as a culture, we are learning what “equality” really means. What it looks like in real time to treat people with love and kindness and empathy from a centered and secure place.

We are beginning to understand what a green flag man looks like. And we know he is a man women feel safe with. Full stop.

So now, women have witnessed what true honoring of their humanity looks like. Something we thought we had to give up long ago, in exchange for safety. He understands. He is soft. He is slow. He is safe. He witnesses. He listens. He moves with her.

And we will never be the same.

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A personalized Sunday letter for women and abuse survivors

Paying readers receive a weekly, personalized Sunday letter from me and can include extras like this week’s post two days early, a sneak peak at what articles are next, a poll to vote on the next essays, and always—encouraging words for what’s going on in our world.

This summer, I am putting a pause on some of my other writing (because of kids at home!)—but I have made it a priority to write and send these weekly Sunday newsletters for paying readers. As our nation and life has felt heavier and more worrisome, I wanted a special place for women to go to and receive encouragement and hope at the start of each week.

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A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly— and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Dearest Reader,

This week I sat down to write over and over and over again, just for my words to come out with white-hot rage.

I cycled between anger and freeze so quickly, my outlines, notes and thoughts on paper—just felt like a spewed-out mess.

I took a “sick day” this week from the free publication. Those articles are typically more formal and polishe…

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Dear Readers,

This week we had a series of events happen that whiplashed my world. I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned—with little kids at home for the summer and getting ready for the house to be shown to potential buyers over and over and over this week. At one point, I braced the sink and cried over it.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

It was too much. Where w…

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Click below to listen to an audio recording of this post, read by me:

I grew up on eleven acres surrounded by cornfields and prairie. Maybe that’s why, as I stepped onto the Rocky Mountain trail today, it felt like home. I was back in the wild.

Acres as far as the eye can see of evergreen and one-hundred-and-eighty-degree views of mountains. Layers of blue—misty and magnificent. Untouched by humans.

I stood there for minutes on end, thinking about painting them and realizing that no human hand could ever capture such beauty.

I chose the two-mile hike instead of the one-mile—feeling inspired.

The stillness felt like it wrapped around me like a warm blanket. About a quarter mile in, I thought about what I suppose most women think about when hiking solo: Am I safe out here from men?

The thought churned my stomach. This was my first-ever solo hike. I told myself I used to train for half marathons alone. But then my own mind rebutted—but that was in the city, on well-traveled walking paths.

There were bears and mountain lions here—was I afraid of them? Bears—no. I had encountered them before. They are far more scared of humans than we are of them. Mountain lions are a little more serious, but they are rare, and the likelihood of them attacking a human was slim. But men…

I thought about a woman I saw who ran with a knife. A big one—for safety. I wish I had a big knife.

I stopped for a moment and took a deep breath, filling my lungs with mountain air. Listening to the quiet. Taking in the beauty surrounding me.

Bright yellow caught my eye, and I bent down to examine the drop-like flowers, marveling at their colors. These were flowers I was unfamiliar with, and I felt a burst of excitement to get to know them by name when we moved here. I thought of Braiding Sweetgrass and how Kimmerer talked about flowers this way too—how they were her friends.

A tiny little brown bird with a rust-colored spot on its head and a black mask flitted beside my path. I stopped to appreciate him. I wondered what it was—the wildlife so unfamiliar to me here—and wished I had brought my birding book.

A small chipmunk scurried past me and scampered up onto a rock, beginning to chew something in its tiny little paws—its cheeks puffing out. I stopped, smiled, and marveled at this tiny creature. Its little white stripes and how close it was to me.

The incline was steeper than I had planned, especially for street shoes. But that was all I had brought for this quick trip to the Rockies. I hadn’t even been sure if I could hike or if I would have free time. And I was no expert. The only hiking I had really done in the past was the family kind, where you randomly choose a trail short and easy enough for small kids and then make sure they don’t eat something poisonous, get picked off, or climb up too high—basically watching the children with a good amount of anxiety, more than enjoying anything to do with hiking.

But here I was alone. Completely alone.

I stood and listened to the quiet several times, marveling at the complete lack of sound. No wind. No human sounds. Barely any animal sounds.

It reminded me of what my therapist and I had talked about this week—somatic therapy. Relaxing, calming, and soothing the nervous system. And how important this was for me—for survivors who had experienced physical abuse. This felt like the best kind of somatic therapy.

I moved my shoulders, took another deep breath, and thought that being out here in the wild was better than any massage or yoga session I’d had.

It restored me. Revitalized me.

Gave.

When so much in life took.

A giant bird swooped over me, and I stilled, surprised. Was it an eagle? It landed and cawed majestically. No—a raven. But the biggest raven I had ever seen. In the evergreens, another call answered. A pair. The big bird swooped back over me and disappeared into the thicket of trees. Its call changed—more of a bark. Almost human and a little eerie. It reminded me again of how alone I was out here. In the backcountry. The thought was both thrilling and a bit stomach-churning.

I wondered where I was. How far had I gone?

My legs began to ache. I used to run many, many miles. Sometimes over thirteen in one go. But that had been a long time ago. Babies, loneliness, and survival had changed all of that. It had been a long time since I had done something like this. It reminded me how much I enjoyed physical activity like this. How much I had missed this. How I could do this so much more when we moved here.

I wondered how long the hike was. It was only two miles. I could do that, right? I had thought so when picking the trail.

I looked behind me—the decline that I had skidded down—and then in front of me—an incline. This hike was definitely moderate. Very little of it was flat. And the inclines were more than I had anticipated.

Suddenly, a whooping noise had me ducking and bracing. I looked to my left at a huge outcropping of rock. Massive. A great place for something large to hide. A mountain lion? A man? My stomach knotted up.

No. A teeny tiny bird.

It was the same kind of bird I had seen when I first started the trail. So small. Brown, and with a rust-colored spot on its head. It moved again; the fluttering of its wings sounded like a helicopter against the massive outcropping of rock. I marveled at the sound from such a tiny thing. But sound felt different out here. I watched it call and then heard a returning call in the rock crevice.

I smiled a bit and moved on—feeling like the somatic healing part of the hike had left somewhat. That sound had been loud and startling, especially for a nervous system like mine, and I was becoming very tired. I realized the more tired I became and the less certain I was about my environment, the less relaxed I felt.

Out here in the wild, it felt like just me and myself—I heard and felt so much more here.

And I had begun to learn this about myself. Especially during this solo trip. New things could feel terrifying to my nervous system—and uncertain things. The flight delays. The rental vehicle—they had upgraded me to a Jeep that felt like driving a tank. The Airbnb—I didn’t sleep a wink the first night. But day two…then day three…my body began to relax. I began to understand these rhythms of my body and nervous system, and accept them.

The largest noise I encountered on the hike was from a pair of robins at the end of the trail. Back home, we call them Mrs. Robin and Mr. Robin. We have since the kids were little. I’m not sure why. Probably because we had a nesting pair on our porch when we moved back to the prairie. We didn’t have friends or family who were close—so the birds became our friends.

I couldn’t believe the racket they made. Recently, we had gone to a little birding event at our local library, and one of the older gentlemen ran a station where he talked about the robin. “Experts think they bounce to emulate raindrops so that worms climb to the surface.”

I watched the pair bounce about, making a small ruckus. Twigs snapping. Leaves crunching. I wondered if this was true. I said hello to them, and they looked at me curiously as they made their noise.

Cars began passing through the trees ahead of me. Thank all that was good in the world. I didn’t feel like I could make it anymore. My legs were on fire. I set one foot in front of the other on an even steeper incline, but the path curved left—not where the cars were going.

Was I on the right trail? I had to stop and look at a map on my phone and was thankful I got service in one spot to check and make sure I was on the right trail. Which—I am so glad I did. I almost had gone on an eleven-mile loop instead of the two.

I was nearing the finish.

Dark clouds had slowly filled the sky throughout my trek, and I wondered if I would find myself in the rain. I had checked the weather app, and it didn’t call for rain—but that mattered somewhat little in the mountains. Things could change quickly. It reminded me of Craig Adams—the kids and I call him the hiking guy—on YouTube. Sometimes I put his hiking videos on in the background. He hiked through rain quite a bit. I could too.

The incline steepened, but I felt more energy. It felt like tackling hills when I ran cross-country in high school. I could do this. Even if that was twenty years ago. I wish I had brought water—but I did have that in the Jeep. I was so very thankful that at 9,700 feet, I hadn’t felt light-headed or sick. There were a couple times I felt my heart racing—but I remembered how this felt when I first started training for half marathons in Denver. On my first speed-training run, I felt like I was having a heart attack. It had taken months to get used to the elevation.

It was okay. I just needed to take it slow. Be kind to my body. Understanding. Compassionate.

A beautiful one-eighty-degree view of mountains greeted me back up at the top. I had made it. I marveled at what I had just done. Marveled at how difficult and lengthy that trek had felt—much, much more than I had anticipated. But I had done it.

I sat down, exhausted.

Finally glad to be at the top. Finally glad to sit. I sprawled out on a bench. And felt a raindrop. Then two. Three. Four.

Then it began to downpour. I laughed and said, “Fine! Be that way!” to the clouds, and smiling, I ran to my car—shielding my head.

I grew up on eleven acres surrounded by cornfields and prairie.

Maybe that’s why, as I left the wild mountain land today, it felt like leaving home. And I hoped someday soon to return. A tear slid down my cheek at the thought.

But today, as I trekked solo in the mountain wild, listening to the life all around me—and within me—making space for myself and the world, it healed something inside of me that I didn’t know needed tending.

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A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly—this Substack newsletter in print, and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

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*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Dearest Reader,

Today’s Sunday newsletter—and Wildflowers Grow Weekly—comes to you a bit differently. Every Sunday for twenty weeks or so now, I’ve sent a personalized email to your inbox separate from Substack.

That meant, if you ever were on the app and wanted to read a Sunday paid newsletter, or if you signed up—let’s say on a Monday—you would have to…

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I don’t usually use swear words in my essays.

But as I typed the outline to this post, bleary from exhaustion—it came out raw, organic, and honest.

Lately, I’ve had what feels like a considerable realization in my life. For three weeks, I’ve struggled. I had a loved one pass away, and as we readied our house for sale, terrible, debilitating trauma overwhelmed me. I felt useless. Worthless. Full of shame.

One night, I went to bed exhausted from working endlessly on projects to ready the house—toiling into the night—and I felt too tired to breathe.

I’ve never been that physically tired. Not even nursing newborns around the clock with little to no sleep and no help, postpartum with blood spilling out of my post-birth, wrecked body. That was at least in my twenties.

We put the oxygen monitor on my finger, and it dipped down the 80s. I felt like I was going to pass out. Anyone in the medical field who’s reading this knows those numbers are not good.

So I withdrew.

From everyone.

Our world wasn’t built for women’s or survivors’ cycles

Texts would come from loved ones, and I didn’t feel like I had the capacity to respond. Comments would come on Substack and, like the text messages, I would think about them throughout the day—without feeling like I had the bandwidth to say anything back. It paralyzed me, the idea of expending social energy. It terrified me.

What if I ruined our relationship because I responded wrong? What if I said something to give of myself—when I feel like I have nothing to give right now? What if I lose myself again?

So, I collapsed inward. Like I do when life feels like far too much.

And what I realized when I typed this title out was that I was coming back from that exhaustion. That I was feeling energy again. That this bottomless pit of exhaustion for so many women and survivors like me comes in cycles.

Because our world was not set up for feminine cycles of energy—the kind that ebb and flow, build and withdraw, like the moon and her light. There are only a few days where she shines bright. All the other days, she is waxing and waning. Building, withdrawing, resting, and then shining bright.

No—our world is built for men who cycle like the sun, largely structured around male hormonal rhythms and industrial productivity models. Men’s hormonal patterns tend to be more stable day to day, while women often experience more cyclical shifts physically, emotionally, hormonally, relationally, and energetically.

And further, for patriarchy—valuing humans only for their output and their usefulness. Expecting women to perform with the consistency of machines. Shaming those who don’t shine brightly, at full capacity—every single fucking day.

Historically, men had women to carry the invisible labor

The Industrial Revolution led to a surge in “machine-belt” labor. Work became streamlined, segmented, and optimized to squeeze every drop of human output possible. For progress. For money. For the rich white men who owned railroads and banks.

And while men labored within the machine, women were expected to become the unseen batteries within it.

Women supported their men at home, juggling everything else to support his 9-to-5. She carried the children, the groceries, the birthdays, the emotional temperature of the home. She remembered what was needed before anyone else even noticed. She was encouraged, expected, and told this was her ultimate duty.

And if he was angry from work, he came home and she was expected to absorb that too. If he was unhappy, she was taught to look inward first. What had she done wrong? What more could she give? How could she become softer, quieter, easier to hold?

So she gave more.

Christianity boomed alongside this system and reinforced it. Eve—the helper. The supporter. The second. Women were expected to give endlessly of themselves while remaining grateful for proximity to male power and protection. Expected to raise his offspring. Expected to give her body fully. Expected to give all of herself.

Meanwhile, men could earn an income, own property, open credit cards, vote, and build identities outside the home long before women were allowed access to those same freedoms.

The machine promised men privilege, power, and happiness—all while using them too. Blinding them from seeing women as equal to everything they had. But this promise was only good if women remained supply—treated as second.

And I see how this harms men as well.

My husband works for a web design agency. Every fifteen minutes of his time is tracked and billed. He never takes a lunch break. Vacation days feel stressful instead of restorative. Forty-hour weeks are never really forty hours.

Our culture teaches men and women that their worth is tied to productivity. That rest is laziness. That stopping is failure.

And women were expected to absorb the fallout from all of it.

How women are unplugging from the patriarchal machine

Self-compassion.

Understanding.

Exhale.

Those three things are the key to unlocking this tight patriarchal cage and releasing ourselves from being used as supply.

When we aren’t functioning at 100%, we can have so much compassion for our bodies, our minds, and our lives. We can say things like, “Of course I feel this way. Of course. It makes so much sense. And it’s okay.”

Without any expectation to change it right this second. Without any shame. Feeling the raw and honest truth of exactly where we are in our season—in whatever phase of the moon we find ourselves.

And further, accepting the capacity of our mind and body right where it is. At whatever level it is.

Our capacity as women and survivors changes, depending on what we are facing. We are dynamic creatures. With soul, vitality, and life. Not cogs in a machine.

There are seasons of deep grief, depression, trauma, chronic pain, motherhood, healing, and so much more. Holidays and social events can exhaust so many of us, throwing our rhythms out of sync for weeks at a time.

The survival mode, the nervous-system depletion, emotional bandwidth, invisible cognitive load—it’s so very real for us. Symptoms of living in a system where we were expected to function like machine-belt laborers. 100%. Repetitive task, task, task. No breaks. Used like cogs in a machine.

Now women can realize that every version of us is worthy.

No matter what percentage of ourselves today we are showing up as.

Conclusion—women breaking free

So as I typed the outline for this essay, I wrote these words wearily on my phone:

Sometimes women don’t have the fucking energy.

Because I had been in seasons where I was emptied out completely. For three weeks here, I struggled to show up for my writing. And my knee-jerk reaction was complete and total shame.

Shame for not functioning at all times at 100%. My career had always expected it. School had always expected it. College had always expected it. So too did my social circles and family. Because they were conditioned within the same system I was.

Expecting men to mindlessly work—with little to no emotional capacity or nurturing. And women to fill up the rest of the space, taking on the mental and emotional load of life itself. Expected to absorb male behavior and all manner of pain and suffering. Because we “deserved it”. We took the apple in the garden, right? So we owed men (and the patriarchal society) all of ourselves: mind, body, and soul.

But as I’ve aged and healed and learned myself—I’ve realized how different my capacity and capabilities are in different seasons. As a mother. As a young person. As a midlife person. As someone who faces chronic illness and a mental health diagnosis due to a high level of repetitive trauma during my developing adolescent years.

I am not a fully functioning battery to be plugged into a system of expectation and a promise of worth—at all times.

And I refuse to absorb male and patriarchal behavior anymore in my life. This caused me to end up in the hospital, facing my end. I’m done with that.

Now, I can work on facing the moments of my day with truth and honesty instead of expectation and shame.

I can release this and, in its place, find tiny flickerings of joy and goodness. Slowness and presence.

I can realize I am like the moon—I wax, wane, and move organically in my capacity. Like the tides. Like so many other things in nature. And those around me who expect my energy to be at a certain level for their own use are distanced—no longer granted access to that energy. Retired from their seat at my table.

Because sometimes I don’t have the fucking energy.

I’m at ten percent capacity,

but 100% worth.

Upgrade to receive Wildflowers Grow Weekly

Unplug, exhale and rewild. A wild feminine aesthetic newsletter + weekly journal in print—to escape the noise, pause and connect to your inner knowing in your own time each week.

Wildflowers Grow Weekly is the printable version of this publication + journal—created for readers and dreamers, women and survivors. For pause. Stillness. Exhale.

Rest as rebellion—from a system that wears us down for its own benefit. We rest so we can rise. To create space apart from the online world and its noise.

• Each edition includes a gentle letter from me, the week’s essay formatted for slow, aesthetic reading, and a dedicated weekly journaling section inviting feminine rewilding: finding the path back to your true, natural self amidst the storms, plus some added surprises. An invitation to unplug, listen deeply, and reconnect. In this pause, feel free to highlight, circle, notate and linger.

• Paying readers also receive a weekly Sunday email from me that includes Wildflowers Grow Weekly two days early, a sneak peak at what articles are next, a poll to vote on the next essays, and a little behind-the-scenes note. Along with access to a library of resources in The Wildflower Library, the private bookshelf for paid readers and previous issues in print in The Wildflowers Grow Weekly collection.

• Your contribution also supports this publication’s mission of amplifying the light in the voices of women and survivors of abuse, including my own: a feminine outcry that seeks to defend the marginalized, honor human dignity, and carry a message of value, safety, and love into the world.

Upgrade, become a paying reader receive the latest issue of Wildflowers Grow Weekly (along with the additional things listed above) by visiting:

The Wildflower Library

*Note: Wildflowers Grow Weekly is a digital pdf, designed as an instant downloadable newsletter + weekly journal to unplug, exhale, print in your own time and read at your own pace.

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly—this Substack newsletter in print, and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Trigger Warning: This article contains one paragraph briefly describing physical abuse to provide context for what many survivors have endured—and the strength it takes to survive it. I have marked the beginning and end of this paragraph with an asterisk (*). If you are sensitive to this type of material, please feel free to skip the section between the asterisks.

“You take life too seriously.”

I was stunned by the statement. A train wreck happened suddenly in my mind—everything I knew about the world crashing into who I thought I was supposed to be…how I was supposed to act in order to be safe, accepted, loved.

And now, twenty years later, as I look back on that defining moment in my life, I realize with sadness what was happening.

For many women—especially abuse survivors—life is serious.

I was eighteen at the time and had just left an abusive system. I was the oldest daughter, groomed in a high-control religion, chained by purity culture, raised by a narcissistic and physically abusive parent.

*
I did physical therapy for over a year on the hip where the belt would hit me—day after day, year after year, throughout so much of my young and developing life. I am thirty-eight now, and I still struggle with terrible pain in that same left hip. Two years ago, the exact place where they would grab my left arm began causing me so much pain that I lost feeling in the limb. I had to stop writing because I could no longer use my fingers properly. No doctor or test could explain why.
*

But I knew why.

I took life seriously because I had to.

And even beyond abuse, today’s world is riddled with catastrophe for the nervous system—from the news, to social media, to the constant pressure and noise of modern life. It feels difficult not to take life seriously.

We live in a world where women have learned to brace. A world where women were taught that it was their role to brace. And often, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

As I reached midlife, that bracing consumed me like a dark cloud. Years of carrying everything turned into chronic pain, depression, and crippling anxiety. Eventually, I found myself in the hospital facing the end of my life.

And I thought back to that phrase.

The man who told me I took life too seriously was right. (Yes, it was a man—go figure.) I had been taught to carry everything. So many women have.

So how do we stop carrying it all?
Is it even possible to take life “less seriously”?
To find joy and peace within the body, the mind, and the society we find ourselves in?

These were the questions I faced in the hospital as I met doctor after doctor who had no explanation for the chronic pain consuming my world. I had to find the answers. Because I knew that if I didn’t, I would not survive this. And worse—I would pass this suffering down to my two little girls.

When women learned to brace as children

I realized that this hypervigilance and catastrophizing did not start when my body began to break down around age thirty-five. It was learned. Conditioned. Taught to brace and carry—my brain developed this coping mechanism as a little girl.

There were certain words that kept rising to the surface as I explored my own childhood. Words that helped define how my mind learned to cope in a high-demand, high-control environment. Self exchanges for safety.

Catastrophizing. Assuming the worst possible outcome.
Hypervigilance. Unpredictability is dangerous, so we constantly scan for it.
Emotional dysregulation. Reacting disproportionately to a present situation due to intense past pain.
Learned helplessness. Feeling trapped and powerless due to repeated experiences where safety and autonomy were denied.
Fight, flight, fawn, freeze. Responses to chronic trauma states.
Negativity bias. The brain prioritizing threats over pleasure or safety.
Black-and-white thinking. Viewing situations or people in extremes like good or bad, with little room for nuance or complexity.

Many women, as little girls, learned to brace, absorb, and carry their parents’ behavior and expectations at such a tender and young age. Usually we had at least one parent who exploded unexpectedly over small things. We learned to walk on eggshells—and our bodies never learned how to stop bracing.

Many of us are experts at reading people—so well, in fact, that we can read most people better than they can read themselves. And that makes most people extremely uncomfortable. Learning to monitor tone, facial expressions, energy, etc.

We became empaths, feeling deeply what those around us feel. Knowing exactly how they feel because we learned to feel it in ourselves too.

We became “mature” in some areas far too early, and regressed in others (like identity, self-confidence, agency, capability, and social skills). And felt responsible for everyone else’s emotional states around us.

When life felt unpredictable, our brains started treating everything as potentially dangerous.

So a text message from a friend felt enormous, failure felt catastrophic, conflict was existential, rest felt unsafe, uncertainty was intolerable. We took life…very seriously. Where others did not.

Now, so many of us are realizing how this way of living is no longer doable.

But in this understanding, a deeper one has emerged for me. It wasn’t just my household and childhood that conditioned me. Now that I have identified the threads in the fabric of how I learned to understand the world, I see it everywhere.

No one is entirely exempt from this conditioning. Especially women. Especially little girls. But identifying the pattern is also what allows us to finally begin finding our way out of it.

Women are batteries for the patriarchal machine

Even women and those who didn’t grow up in overt abusive households were shaped by systems that thrive on fear. The media, hustle culture and purity culture, beauty standards, religion, and politics…

A dysregulated woman is profitable.

Fear sells. Urgency sells. Insecurity sells.

Exhaustion leads to compliance.

And women, especially trauma survivors and the marginalized are often conditioned to become emotional laborers and “batteries” for systems that extract from them. Women are conditioned to self-abandon and the system tells them it’s their “role”. To caretake. To nurture. To stay small and quiet. To become the emotional load bearers of society. To be ultimately the gender responsible for…everything.

Our system then rewards “useful” women and burnout gets applause. Self-sacrifice—especially for mothers—gets romanticized. Exhaustion gets called ambition. Anxiety is mistaken as responsibility. All while women earn less than men, spend more time on caregiving (on top of their full-time jobs), and household activities.¹

As the chronic pain in my life peaked and I found myself completely debilitated, after my two weeks in the hospital, I started asking myself some pretty serious questions, like:

Who benefits from women believing rest is laziness?

Who benefits from women staying afraid, dysregulated and small?

Who benefits when women are too exhausted to know who we are?

It became ever clearer to me that women are being siphoned. Used as supply for a system dominated by men and taught that this was our place. That this benefited us. That our proximity to power was not only our role, but that it would keep us safe and at our happiest.

So many of us ate the lie whole and thought it would fuel our world. Instead, it was insidious poison—seeping into every part of us, until it darkened our whole world and slowly took away everything we held dear.

And many women still eat the poison. Many women stay plugged in, because their world depends on the lies. Their identity. Their usefulness. Their purpose. And to deny it would mean denying everything they know. It would cut off this promise of safety—the reward system.

So they continue to feed the system, and the rich white billionares at the top of the biggest pyramid scheme of all time—thriving because the majority of society is conditioned to supply it. It’s their identity after all. And we’re too tired, overworked, and poor to fight the growing men in power at the top. They get richer, we get poorer—in so many ways.

But many women are waking up.

When women stop carrying it all

Women communally are beginning to unplug themselves from the system. Finally, for the first time in our lifetimes, we are able to do so because we are finding safety. Safety in our own bodies, separate from men and the system. Safety in earning our own salaries. Safety in existing without bracing. Without carrying it all.

We’ve stopped believing the lies and stopped consuming the poisoned promises.

And the manosphere hates it. We are their supply. And their supply is finding self-dependence. So they do everything they can to take women back down beneath their own capabilities.

A woman who doesn’t live beneath a man’s insecurities is seen as a threat. She is a mirror to his shortcomings. And it’s so much easier to bring her down than for him to rise up and grow. Because that means facing something most men will not acknowledge: their pain and their faults that have developed due to this unfaced pain. And the people they have hurt and are hurting. It takes responsibility. Self-accountability.

Something women have always had.

The very thing women were taught to carry from a young age.

So many of us are finally finding freedom, nervous-system healing, and shedding the bonds of a system that brainwashed us into believing that our purpose and value were in achievement, self-sacrifice, and holding everyone’s discomfort and pain.

We are finding slow living, rewilding, nature, imperfection, and reclaiming joy and exhale.

Things that were demonized for so many of us.

Where the patriarchal system is one of control, productivity, linearity, and perfection for those who power it, shedding these bonds and unplugging often looks cyclical, intuitive, slow, messy, and alive.

Women and abuse survivors are slowly learning that it’s okay to live a quiet, little life. Where there are no awards. No accolades. No achievements in the eyes of rich white men. Like wealth, popularity, power, and status.

Maybe we will live lives where no one will ever know our names at all. But we will pass down something else much more sacred and powerful.

Conclusion—Passing down freedom

We are learning to soften, to rest, to wander, to laugh again and to raise our children differently—even when fighting the terrible trauma we have experienced in this system.

We are learning not to perform life, but to actually live it.

That learning joy and pleasure is not irresponsible, rest is not weakness and maybe most of all that a regulated nervous system looks “unproductive” to a culture built on chronic stress.

But this ends with us.

And maybe the greatest rebellion of all is teaching ourselves and our children not believe their worth must be earned through suffering. That we always have worth, no matter what the external world tells us.

That our children and our inner child no longer has to brace. No longer has to read the room, catastrophize and be hypervigilent to be safe.

No longer a battery for the patrichal machine—the big pyramid scheme. Because a dysregulated nervous system is a profitable one. So we learn and pass down self-safety, rest, self-security, confidence and room to make mistakes.

We are passing down emotional regulation, joy, boundaries, creativity without constraint, and endurance without self-abandonment. And these ideals are only a threat to a system that profits off of them.

Success no longer looks like exhaustion, fatigue, pain, suffering, hopelessness, helplessness, quiet, smallness.

It looks like presence, safety in our bodies, laughing easily, creating beautiful things that fill our spirit, resting without guilt, loving without fear and most of all—belonging to ourselves again.

So a man once told me I took life too seriously. And after hospitalization and chronic pain, this statement came back to me—I went on a mission to dig deep and unpack the why and the how in order to live and protect my children. I realized that he didn’t have to take life seriously, because he didn’t grow up like I had—didn’t live a life so many women and survivors have.

I learned that we were conditioned to take life seriously—to fear. To brace. To carry. To carry the weight of the world.

So what happens when women stop carrying it all?

I learned that this is one word:

Freedom.

Freedom for us, our inner child, the next generation

and everyone whos lives we touch.

¹ “All while women earn less than men, spend more time on caregiving (on top of their full-time jobs), and household activities.” Reference.

Upgrade to receive Wildflowers Grow Weekly

Unplug, exhale and rewild. A wild feminine aesthetic newsletter + weekly journal in print—to escape the noise, pause and connect to your inner knowing in your own time each week.

Wildflowers Grow Weekly is the printable version of this publication + journal—created for readers and dreamers, women and survivors. For pause. Stillness. Exhale.

Rest as rebellion—from a system that wears us down for its own benefit. We rest so we can rise. To create space apart from the online world and its noise.

• Each edition includes a gentle letter from me, the week’s essay formatted for slow, aesthetic reading, and a dedicated weekly journaling section inviting feminine rewilding: finding the path back to your true, natural self amidst the storms, plus some added surprises. An invitation to unplug, listen deeply, and reconnect. In this pause, feel free to highlight, circle, notate and linger.

• Paying readers also receive a weekly Sunday email from me that includes Wildflowers Grow Weekly two days early, a sneak peak at what articles are next, a poll to vote on the next essays, and a little behind-the-scenes note. Along with access to a library of resources in The Wildflower Library, the private bookshelf for paid readers and previous issues in print in The Wildflowers Grow Weekly collection.

• Your contribution also supports this publication’s mission of amplifying the light in the voices of women and survivors of abuse, including my own: a feminine outcry that seeks to defend the marginalized, honor human dignity, and carry a message of value, safety, and love into the world.

Upgrade, become a paying reader receive the latest issue of Wildflowers Grow Weekly (along with the additional things listed above) by visiting:

The Wildflower Library

*Note: Wildflowers Grow Weekly is a digital pdf, designed as an instant downloadable newsletter + weekly journal to unplug, exhale, print in your own time and read at your own pace.

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly—this Substack newsletter in print, and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Did you ever come to a realization that other people don’t experience certain things the same way you do and then you felt a bit…mind blown?

I had that happen this week.

A little context: remember that book review we did lately where I sort of bashed one of the authors that a mega-influencer from my area said was her now-favorite book of all time? Well, I’m reading it. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried.

Yours Truly is the typical “fall in love” kind of story, but one of the characters (the male love interest in this case) has high anxiety.

In detail, the author walks the reader through his hypervigilant thoughts, his ruminating, and the situations where his anxiety is highest: particularly new situations, new people, new things.

Jimenez reveals an inner world to us where anxiety lives in the passenger seat: the character tells us that he typically avoids new restaurants, and if someone does invite him, he looks extensively online at the environment (the lighting, the space), the menu (he takes a long time picking out exactly what food he will order), and the reviews.

Before he’s ever stepped in the restaurant, unbeknownst to the people (or person) he’s going with, he has given himself as much data as he could to try to possibly feel safe and less anxious there. And he always feels anxious eating food in front of people, especially strangers.

Me too.

I do wish Jimenez had written a bit more of the “why” behind her main character’s anxiety, instead of “he was always a sensitive boy”. Because for most of us, the reason is trauma in one way or another.

And for many adult women this has manifested into major health issues like chronic illness, endometriosis and more—someone should write a book about this. But I suppose this would take the vibe of her book from “light and airy” to something more raw—and this genre of readers (I am finding myself one of them sometimes), is not looking for raw and challenging at the moment.

And breathing—box breathings, counting, anxiety attacks, flashbacks. None of these are a part of the character’s development. But those with anxiety are typically well versed in some (if not all) of these things.

What about if this main character with anxiety walked into a restaurant situation and it was different than the pictures?

Packed, wall-to-wall, being sat with his back to the main walkway where people bumped into him every second? So loud, he couldn’t hear the people next to him? Feeling like he was trapped—that he couldn’t leave. And then having an anxiety attack so bad, he had to go into the bathroom and try to stop crying and sucking air?

That has happened to me.

But I cried reading this book because I’ve never read a character that dealt with anxiety like I have. I cried because the other character (the girl in the story and the other side of the boy-girl, fall-in-love romance) writes him a letter that gives space to the anxiety he experiences. She listens. She accepts him. She meets him in the supply closet for lunch instead of in the loud cafeteria. It was sweet. It was loving. It was kind.

She never tells him to suck it up, to go to more therapy, that something is wrong with him, or that he should change.

She accepts him 100% exactly as he is. Not expecting him to change. Trusting that he knew himself, and was doing his best with what life had handed him. Not taking on any mental or physical load from his anxiety, but working with him out of understanding.

Sharing the restaurant when they were to meet with a couple that evening (because it was a little last minute). Describing the two new people he would meet (who they were, and what they did). Taking a picture of the busy parking lot to show him where he could park. Getting consent and making sure that he agreed to this decision and felt capable to take on this particular social outing and what it entailed.

Caring. Understanding. Loving.

Not enabling—but understanding when situations are the most stressful and would flare the anxiety he lived with and worked so hard to manage.

This book comes at a time where anxiety is flaring absolutely terribly in my life.

Three days ago we listed our house for sale. I’ve never sold a house. I’ve never done this. And this felt like my first home. I have terrible trauma memories of selling and leaving my first home as a child.

This week, we’ve had a showing and an open house, where I have cleaned, cleaned, cleaned. My husband calls when I do this in a particular way “panic cleaning”. And I feel it full body. The absolute panic. I feel like someone has kicked a chair out from under me and I am shocked and falling backwards.

I haven’t been sleeping well. I wake up gasping for air, my body as tight and painful as steel chords, my jaw tensed tight, my teeth grinding. The sheets stuck to me like damp Saran Wrap.

I have come to understand the shape of the anxiety I feel in some ways. It’s been a constant companion for nearly seven years now—at least, I have realized it since then. The panic attacks used to come so badly, I’d be curled up on the floor, trying my hardest to suck in air that wouldn’t come—feeling like any moment I would die.

The flashbacks used to come so badly that shame took front seat, completely saturating my whole existence and coiled in deep to whisper how much of an excuse of a human being I was. That I deserved suffering—that this was my place because all I did was cause others to suffer. My very existance was shameful. Complete and total helplessness took over—like a tiny black box I once found myself trapped in as a child while others who held it down, laughed.

“Complex PTSD,” the physchologist had told me. He went on to tell me about war vetrins and how the flashbacks I was experienced were similar, at least when it came to brain and body chemistry.

My therapist told me that CPTSD is an anxiety disorder.

But most people don’t understand. I didn’t even understand. Abby Jimenez’s book gave me some more understanding. It released some of the shame. I have been trying so, so, so hard so much of my life to be like other people. To hide the panic and anxiety—to bury it down as fucking deep as humanly possible. Especially in crowded rooms, in loud places and with strangers.

But other people live with this too. Others like us have a world of thought going on behind their eyes, and quiet demeanor—especially within a pause, one a normal person might not take. And especially when the anxiety is filling their lungs with pain and panic. But on the outside, they look a bit like everyone else. Calm. Contained. But masked. To be palatable. To be accepted. To be loved.

This has been my whole life.

And while I wished it wasn’t so, (I wished it wasn’t so for you either, if you experience any of this), I feel somewhat comforted by author’s like Jiminez who share a world where people with anxiety aren’t broken, or shameful, or need to instantly be different. But can be loved for exactly who they are, and exactly how they feel this very second.

That these feelings, as much as we work on them every week in therapy, and sometimes with every staggered breath during the day—doing everything we can with exercise, eating healthy, drinking water, taking the right medicines, going to the doctors appointments (even if we have to fight the anxiety just reading the appointment on our calendar), and consuming information on how to not have anxiety, how to be normal—likely will live with some measure of this our whole lives.

We can gently set down the salvation fantasy, continue to understand our inner worlds and give those findings the nurturing (feminine) and protection (masculine) that they never had and so desperately craved (especially as a child).

And be okay, finally with who we are.

Knowing that most people will never understand. But that’s okay.

Because we do. And we deserve so much love through every second of the anxiety we feel.

Upgrade to receive Wildflowers Grow Weekly

Unplug, exhale and rewild. A wild feminine aesthetic newsletter + weekly journal in print—to escape the noise, pause and connect to your inner knowing in your own time each week.

Wildflowers Grow Weekly is the printable version of this publication + journal—created for readers and dreamers, women and survivors. For pause. Stillness. Exhale.

Rest as rebellion—from a system that wears us down for its own benefit. We rest so we can rise. To create space apart from the online world and its noise.

Each edition includes a gentle letter from me, the week’s essay formatted for slow, aesthetic reading, and a dedicated weekly journaling section inviting feminine rewilding: finding the path back to your true, natural self amidst the storms, plus some added surprises. An invitation to unplug, listen deeply, and reconnect with your inner knowing. In this pause, feel free to highlight, circle, notate and linger.

• Paying readers also receive a weekly Sunday email from me that includes Wildflowers Grow Weekly two days early, a sneak peak at what articles are next, a poll to vote on the next essays, and a little behind-the-scenes note. Along with access to a library of resources in The Wildflower Library, the private bookshelf for paid readers and previous issues in print in The Wildflowers Grow Weekly collection.

• Your contribution also supports this publication’s mission of amplifying the light in the voices of women and survivors of abuse, including my own: a feminine outcry that seeks to defend the marginalized, honor human dignity, and carry a message of value, safety, and love into the world.

Upgrade, become a paying reader receive the latest issue of Wildflowers Grow Weekly (along with the additional things listed above) by visiting:

The Wildflower Library

*Note: Wildflowers Grow Weekly is a digital pdf, designed as an instant downloadable newsletter + weekly journal to unplug, exhale, print in your own time and read at your own pace.

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly—this Substack newsletter in print, and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

Subscribe now

Dearest Reader,

It was on the eleven-hour drive across several state lines, our small kiddos screaming in the backseat—on our way to the funeral of someone I loved dearly—when I opened up my phone and saw the CNN article on Rape Academy.

I couldn’t process it.

The news sucked all available air from my lungs—air that I didn’t know I still had from the terrible grief I was experiencing. My eyes still bleary with pain—and swollen—I put my phone away and haven’t touched upon it yet in this publication. (Which has weighed on me because I write exclusively for women and abuse survivors.)

In fact, the last two weeks I’ve withdrawn from the online world as someone who’s neurodivergent and diagnosed with CPTSD (which is classified as an anxiety disorder) would when dealing with deep and terrible grief, as well as a major life-changing situation (more on that next time, I think).

Rape Academy, Motherless, Epstein…the weight of the world can feel too terrible sometimes to even hold all the emotions that these things deserve. Especially as survivors ourselves.

As a survivor, I see these things online, and my first reaction is horror—the knowing is a shock to my system that freezes, paralyzes, and overwhelms.

(Related: When Women Feel the World’s Pain Deeply, women and survivors of abuse know—the reality and the hope)

I know this is my sympathetic nervous system kicking in—with the same system of nerves I’ve had debilitating chronic pain flaring for the past two years. Then the feeling balloons in my chest—sheer terror and panic. For an instant, my lungs feel as if they are going to burst.

But I know this feeling so well now.

This is a familiar bodily response—one where I feel like I am going to die. And I’ve felt it so much, it’s a constant companion. I think this might be why I don’t fear death. I have met it so often.

I grieve for the victims. I feel their pain, full body. I want to simultaneously give up on life and rage-scream at the top of my lungs till I am hoarse from the effort, and then keep going—to somehow save them from all this suffering. For all of this to stop. To make the whole world feel this injustice.

Then slowly my rage and pain fades into something different: complete and total acceptance—my brain goes, “Yes, we know. This fits with the pattern of my experience. It fits with so many survivors’ experiences. So many women. We know. This tracks. It does not surprise me. It doesn’t surprise so many women. We know this is what the world is.”

And then some fragment of relief that these things are finally being publicized. Finally, we can see evidence of outrage, but it feels far too late and far too little. It’s not nearly enough. It’s the tip of those iceberg charts, where the top above the water is so incredibly minuscule, and the bottom of the iceberg below the water feels like a massive skyscraper height—like peering up as you drive through mountains that seem to touch the sky, barely fathoming their overwhelming, vast might.

This feels like the breadth of this issue—of the societal poison, infection, and plague that women know so well: male violence towards women. Some of us have lived our entire lives within it. Some of us were groomed exclusively for this.

To not know. To have no identity. To owe men every part of us, with no exceptions. Because we weren’t taught that we were equal. Many of us (especially those of us who grew up within high-control religion and purity culture) were taught that women were separate and different: different roles—and this role for women was one of complete submission to a man, especially male authority and shepherding figures.

Consent was never taught.

Protection was never taught.

Body boundaries were never taught.

I was taught that my female (and Eve-sinning) body was a vessel for men to use for their needs, because God gave them these needs, and my body was made, as a first priority, to satiate male sexual desire—whenever he wanted it. No exceptions. Authority over my body, mind and soul, was transferred from my father to my husband. And this was the ultimate goal.

I even had a Christian therapist point this out in the Bible early on in my marriage, when my husband and I were having issues in the bedroom. I had withdrawn from him, communicating that I felt unsafe. Unloved. He was struggling with porn addition. But this was dismissed as she flipped open her Bible, had me read a verse out loud, and told me that it was my duty to give my husband sex. This was what women were made for. We were made from the rib of a man. And pleasing a man was our moral obligation. This would help my husband with his porn addition. It was my duty to do this.

“So why is this a problem for you?” she stated, condemnation dripping from her voice. Shame pulsed from my core and saturated every part of me. I felt myself collapsing inward. Now I know the shape of this to be self-abandonment—a state that was beat into me. Conditioned. Groomed. Brainwashed. Broken.

I know many women raised within a similar environment understand this in some form. I see it everywhere, and I see it in society too—the whole secular world, at least the Western world, shaped by the Bible and this patriarchal code. Of male entitlement, achievement, anger, and consuming…consuming…consuming. An endless, conditioned, bottomless thirst that can never be satiated. So they rage about it and rage against those they have been conditioned to consume. Their hunger unchecked, encouraged, rewarded, and used.

But there was always a tiny little voice within me that did not understand. It didn’t make logical sense. The why didn’t line up. I was told this voice was called Satan. I was told I had an evil and rebellious heart—from a small and tender age. That I was wrong. Broken. And there was nothing anyone could do to fix me.

Two and a half years ago, I found myself in the hospital due to this conditioning.

At thirty-six years of age, a Pandora’s Box of childhood traumatic memories flooded my brain. And for the first time in my life, I understood that this little voice—the one that had always been beaten down, shamed, and told was Satan—was actually right.

That all those terrible things had, in fact, happened to me. And my brain had protected me for so long—phasing them out in the background. But the overload was too much, and my body and mind went into dissociative shock. I couldn’t understand how to live anymore. The pain was far too much. My entire world was of the deepest suffering and violation I could imagine. Thousands of memories. My entire adolescence. It blotted out my sun. And the sun I was taught to see was a lie.

So when I see these headlines—that knowledge, and those adolescent memories tucked away in my mental totes on shelves as much as I can when I am not sitting on my therapist’s couch, get shoved forcefully forward. The headlines shock. Then validate. Then give some small measure of hope.

And finally, reality sets in: the knowledge of the patterns of the patriarchal society we live in. That men get away with all of this, while women suffer in silence—carrying a weight and a pain that we never should have, so the men don’t have to. Our patriarchal society (especially the Christian, nationalistic, and purity-culture, Bible Belt church I was raised in) taught us that men never have to carry this—especially Godly men. And never should. That is the role of women and those less worthy.

And it turns into debilitating chronic pain, illness, diseases, endometriosis, and so much more. It cripples women and goes from the mind to the body—the suffering manifesting from the inside out. Then the medical world (historically run by the same men) tells us we are making it up.

I can’t tell you the number of doctors who have dismissed me, shamed me, belittled me, and told me that they “can’t help me” because my symptoms didn’t fit in their charts or their tests. The ER became my treatment.

So the last two weeks, I may not have been active on Substack or within your inbox because I needed space to process—for my mental health. And if you need this too, whether you are a survivor, an ally, or not—this is understandable. It’s a uniquely rough time to be a woman and a survivor right now.

It feels like the news comes out and women and survivors scream, “We know! Fucking do something about it! This is unacceptable! We have lived this. Acknowledge this. Change this! Value our voice! Value our lives! Defend us because we were never defended…because it keeps going. It keeps going. We see it…please see it…”

We desperately crave our humanity to be societally acknowledged by validating our deepest and most violating pains and serving justice to those who caused it.

Because we were so terribly objectified and dehumanized within the abuse we suffered. We understand the great depths of this terror like no one else can, and it needs to stop. No one else should ever experience what we have.

We have been on ground zero of this violation, so we have the unique ability of looking up and seeing all the patterns—all the ways this keeps going, all the strands that weave abuse into the fabric of our society. And we will fight with everything we have to stop it.

Because those who benefit in society (usually white men with power and money and endless resources) do everything they can to sweep these realities under the rug they stand on, made of greed, privilege, and entitlement.

Because it’s too destructive to acknowledge, just like I wrote about in What Women Want—And Why Most Men Don’t Know. Sigmund Freud had a chance to believe what women were telling him—a mass amount of female patients who cried out to him about sexual abuse (by known men in power). But instead, he labeled their cries as neurosis, created the Oedipus complex, and stated that women suffered from underdeveloped psychology compared to men. Outing men would have been too disruptive for society—for his white male worldview. It would upend everything they knew.

Just like today.

Women’s suffering and the suffering of the marginalized is the main ingredient in the foundation of our society. Their blood, sweat, tears, and humanity mixed into the concrete that makes up skyscrapers and multi-million-dollar penthouses. The biggest pyramid scheme of all time, with rich white billionaire men at the top and immigrants in cages at the bottom—little girls trafficked and sold as cabinets for 8K on Wayfair. Slaves and the Indigenous who were used, murdered, and violated for progress.

It all still goes on today—the system has just found more and more ways to hide it in plain sight or program major groups of people to deny it in some way that allows it to go on smoothly, without fail, like a well-oiled machine.

But what can you and I do about it?

How can we fight a monster so well-fed, so massive that it takes up the world?

As I write this to you, I think about this fight. And so much of my life where I was conditioned to stay silent. How I withdrew these past two weeks to find my center again and breathe through the world that was shifting rapidly beneath my feet.

I think the answer is a bit like that story of the person throwing the starfish back into the ocean. The beach was covered in them, and someone asked, “There are hundreds of them. Thousands. And you are merely one person—tossing one starfish at a time back into the water. How can you possibly make a difference?”

The starfish tosser looked at the massive stretch of beached life stranded on the horizon—all dying and drying up in the sun as far as the eye could see.

Then they picked up one more and said, “At least I made a difference for this last one.”

And tossed it into the water, saving its life.

I think that is the reason for me. For this publication of Wildflowers Grow. For my purpose here. And maybe it can be for us all in this fight as well.

Even if that one last starfish is just me and my inner child. Or you and yours.

It can give us heart as well that there are many women and allies in this fight alongside us and rallying causes to effect change.

With so much love,

P.S. If you are feeling wrung dry of light and hope and goodness like I had these past two weeks—there is absolutely no shame in this. Sometimes, we must rest and regain our strength to fight on. As I’ve grown older and understood this all-consuming, dark feeling, I have learned that it does fade, and light slowly seeps in, little by little—especially when I feel safe enough to ever so slowly begin to draw the shades. This is what I need. This might be what you need too. And that is 100% okay.

Upgrade to receive Wildflowers Grow Weekly

Unplug, exhale and rewild. A wild feminine aesthetic newsletter + weekly journal in print—to escape the noise, pause and connect to your inner knowing in your own time each week.

Wildflowers Grow Weekly is the printable version of this publication + journal—created for readers and dreamers, women and survivors. For pause. Stillness. Exhale.

Rest as rebellion—from a system that wears us down for its own benefit. We rest so we can rise. To create space apart from the online world and its noise.

Each edition includes a gentle letter from me, the week’s essay formatted for slow, aesthetic reading, and a dedicated weekly journaling section inviting feminine rewilding: finding the path back to your true, natural self amidst the storms, plus some added surprises. An invitation to unplug, listen deeply, and reconnect with your inner knowing. In this pause, feel free to highlight, circle, notate and linger.

• Paying readers also receive a weekly Sunday email from me that includes Wildflowers Grow Weekly two days early, a sneak peak at what articles are next, a poll to vote on the next essays, and a little behind-the-scenes note. Along with access to a library of resources in The Wildflower Library, the private bookshelf for paid readers and previous issues in print in The Wildflowers Grow Weekly collection.

• Your contribution also supports this publication’s mission of amplifying the light in the voices of women and survivors of abuse, including my own: a feminine outcry that seeks to defend the marginalized, honor human dignity, and carry a message of value, safety, and love into the world.

Upgrade, become a paying reader receive the latest issue of Wildflowers Grow Weekly (along with the additional things listed above) by visiting:

The Wildflower Library

*Note: Wildflowers Grow Weekly is a digital pdf, designed as an instant downloadable newsletter + weekly journal to unplug, exhale, print in your own time and read at your own pace.

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly—this Substack newsletter in print, and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.

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Dearest Readers,

This week, I had a dear loved one pass away unexpectedly. I thought about if I would send a newsletter today and if so, what it would be. During times like these, thought and action and time become muddled. And I am a human—not AI—so I am limited with capacity, but I am learning to see the beauty in these limits. There is pain, but also beauty.

As a result, today’s post is brief but does not tread in the shallows. It dives into the deep. I hope it can meet you safely, beautifully and lovingly there—with care.

Love,

“He is now with our Lord.”

I saw the words flash across my screen and a tsunami of feeling crashed against me. A breath and then great sobs were raking my body.

I didn’t expect it.

Do we ever?

Even though time had drawn near for a few days, nothing could have prepared me for the waves.

And the ones that would come at unexpected times the following days. At a stop light as I remembered a fond memory. Outside the rental car building to get a car to drive the great distance to the funeral when my husband asked me if I wanted to go to the viewing. Unexpected. Full body. Flooded.

Life is a strange thing. And death even stranger.

It causes one to face mortality. To blink away the haze of busyness and remember that you are you, looking out your own two eyes like no one else in the universe and that phenomenon of consciousness in this body is so fleeting. Impermanent. Temporary. It feels humbling, strange, and somewhat mystical all at the same time.

I left Christianity a year or two ago—a slow fade from a religeon that had finite rules about death.

But now that I have stepped outside of those tightly gripped claws—I find I am at peace without those rules. The pressure is gone. The fear. The judgement. It comforts me to know he has passed from this hard life into life itself—with us all and me.

The night I learned of my loved one’s passing, a lightning storm cascaded across the spring Midwest sky. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I marveled at it—the wonder and awe of nature—as I sat on the steps of our deck with my dog, transfixed.

Great flashes backlit by purples and blacks forked like vast tree branches across a velvety expanse. Dozens. All at once. They appeared together like synchronized dancers and I thought of him. It felt like he was with me, saying, “Hey.”

He was there and I was here, but we were parts of a whole—connected. Maybe now more than ever.

And I thought about what I would write in this letter. I am not sure what I know today beyond this feeling of grief. I do know the pink eyeshadow I usually use somehow made my eyes look more swollen and red. And that time is strange when you’re getting ready for funeral services. It empties and fills and is there and gone.

My husband and I kept commenting on this with each other through the rush of seemingly back-to-back events throughout the funeral weekend. Suddenly it would be five minutes past the time we were to leave for one of the gatherings and it had felt like hours had passed in an instant. Our brains are strange things when dealing with grief.

And lastly, I took out my phone at the end of the funeral service (hoping no one judged me for typing on my phone at that time) to write down something the speaker had said:

“Someone told me once that grief was an expression of love—unexpressed love. The love we still felt like we had to give.”

I thought this was beautiful.

Upgrade to receive Wildflowers Grow Weekly

Unplug, exhale and rewild. A wild feminine aesthetic newsletter + weekly journal in print—to escape the noise, pause and connect to your inner knowing in your own time each week.

Wildflowers Grow Weekly is the printable version of this publication + journal—created for readers and dreamers, women and survivors. For pause. Stillness. Exhale.

Rest as rebellion—from a system that wears us down for its own benefit. We rest so we can rise. To create space apart from the online world and its noise.

Each edition includes a gentle letter from me, the week’s essay formatted for slow, aesthetic reading, and a dedicated weekly journaling section inviting feminine rewilding: finding the path back to your true, natural self amidst the storms, plus some added surprises. An invitation to unplug, listen deeply, and reconnect with your inner knowing. In this pause, feel free to highlight, circle, notate and linger.

• Paying readers also receive a weekly Sunday email from me that includes Wildflowers Grow Weekly two days early, a sneak peak at what articles are next, a poll to vote on the next essays, and a little behind-the-scenes note. Along with access to a library of resources in The Wildflower Library, the private bookshelf for paid readers and previous issues in print in The Wildflowers Grow Weekly collection.

• Your contribution also supports this publication’s mission of amplifying the light in the voices of women and survivors of abuse, including my own: a feminine outcry that seeks to defend the marginalized, honor human dignity, and carry a message of value, safety, and love into the world.

Upgrade, become a paying reader receive the latest issue of Wildflowers Grow Weekly (along with the additional things listed above) by visiting:

The Wildflower Library

*Note: Wildflowers Grow Weekly is a digital pdf, designed as an instant downloadable newsletter + weekly journal to unplug, exhale, print in your own time and read at your own pace.

A special thank you for reading Wildflowers Grow

Wildflowers Grow is a weekly trauma informed mental health publication by Alice Wild—created for women and survivors of abuse. It is a safe space to rest and grow, to flourish and connect. A place to amplify the light within the voices of those who have been silenced.

If this message—or any part of this post—resonates with you, consider subscribing, liking, commenting, or sharing.

You can also become a paid reader to support this work, join a community of like-minded humans, gain access to Wildflowers Grow Weekly—this Substack newsletter in print, and the ever growing private bookshelf for paid readers.

Subscribe now

*All illustrated images within this essay are hand drawn by author & artist Alice Wild. All rights reserved.