As I look out the windows positioned directly behind the computer monitor at which I now stare, the sky is gray with clouds that bleed so mechanically together, you’d wonder if they were clouds at all. Big, gray mass as far as the eye can see. The asphalt, barren trees, and muted brick of the small Baptist church that sits parallel to my home are all wet with a surprise of rain that frequents Nashville, although no one would guess Music City to welcome such high volumes of dreariness.
This dull and lifeless scene appears almost metaphorically, as a staged backdrop to the story scratching at the innermost walls of my insides, scraping the raw flesh, begging to be told. I don’t mean to be gruesome, or maybe I do, because only words this true could set the proper tone. Only a story this powerful would gnaw and rake to be released from the deepest confinement in which it now sits.
The story begins like most stories do: as a dream.
My intuition tells me it was over a year ago now. I awoke from this dream as I often do, groggy and unable to reconcile the pieces in any way that felt important. I arose from bed, went about my day, but much like the memories that shape us, I could not escape the feeling I needed to uncover what it was this lucid scene was aching to say. What my subconscious felt only an image fabricated in slumber could adequately articulate. The story chewed.
What first comes to mind is the landscape. If you’ve ever visited the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, it felt a lot like the Lied Jungle. Humid air. Stagnant bodies of water. Thick, low-hanging vines that wouldn’t permit you to know from which direction they began. Wild creatures on display for your enjoyment. Zoo animals.
Unlike the Henry Doorly in Omaha, however, most of these spectacle creatures had no cage. As I wandered the strange, yet altogether familiar terrain, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with what initially appeared to be a giant, wet, shiny hippopotamus. Massive, gray skin surface as far as the eye can see. I almost lost interest, looked away in the indifferent manner we turn from something that doesn’t immediately appear it will bear fruit in our lives, when something (was it my subconscious?) whispered I must look again. The story chewed.
What stood before me wasn’t a giant, wet, shiny hippopotamus, but a blood-red beast, mouth agape with rows upon rows of sharp, tiny teeth and an energy I can only describe as a pulsating invitation. I stared down its throat as it beckoned, “Look inside.” Despite the fact there existed nothing to keep this creature contained, no assurance I would be safe from harm’s way, I didn’t feel frightened. I leaned my head further down its throat, gawked in awe and wonder at the magnitude of the magnificent beast, as if my interest alone would allow me to reach the soft belly inside.
There are other parts to the dream, characters that came and went, many levels of interpretation and therapy sessions clocked. And yet every time I analyze the scenes in chronological order, scour the symbolism until all that’s left is the rawest and most delicate pulp, the meat can always be distilled down to one word: sacred.
I suppose I hadn’t realized this until long after, that much like the gray hippopotamus, I too had dimmed what seemed to the outside world rage-filled, blood-red, and wild within me. That at some point, I must have allowed all the color to drain from my vitals until I was diminished to nothing but a spectacle for others to examine and enjoy in the name of their own subversive pleasure. Again, I don’t mean to be gruesome, don’t write in the name of sounding hyperbolic, but doesn’t a caged animal always succumb to the learned nonchalance of their reality up until the very instant they realize they aren’t free? Surely there are confines much worse than these. I didn’t even realize I was trapped.
I’ve found a lot of life can unfold that way, if you let it. All of it even. That’s the nuanced meticulousness of something as pervasive as attempting to contain a person’s essence, their wild. It often occurs so inconspicuously you fail to realize how insidious (and self-inflicted) the act until the only thing left to do is awaken the beast from its slumber. One day you realize roaring with too much animation startles the delicate flowers back into the ground, so you choke down the energy of the vibrations until they are nothing but a muffled cry. Later you uncover your movements, those slow and calculated ways in which you slink toward your desires, albeit natural, are unbecoming. And eventually, you don’t remember an existence without policing each one of your steps. How does one know that an alternative to this life of arduous self-examination exists, until someone (or something) whispers in a dream they must look again?
So awoke I did, both physically and metaphorically. Little did I know this seemingly unimportant dream that couldn’t quite be pieced together in any way that felt important would one day be the catalyst for deep transformation in my life. The story chewed, and suddenly, I wanted to feed it.
Awakening the wild is one thing. For me, however, it was not enough to realize I was sleeping. Once you receive a piece of information that explosive, it takes much more finesse—an often frustrating combination of applied curiosity, evaluation, and perhaps most importantly, honor—to welcome such vitality back into your veins. Time and time again, I lamented to my therapist, “Intellectually, I understand the task at hand. Wake up! Choose yourself! Refuse to suppress the truth of who you are any longer!” My follow-up was always an exasperated: “How?”
You may be asking yourself a similar question. You may feel a connection to the story of losing what’s wild, what’s essential, what’s blood-red and supposedly spoiled within you. Even though we’ve witnessed the denoumount countless times through tales both real and conjured, through the sighs of tired women and everything they’ve ever left unsaid, we still don’t quite understand how to reconcile such a feat once it muscles its way into our own point of focus, try as we might to keep it suppressed in a delicate bow of control. How do we retrain our bodies to move in their most natural state? How do we use the power of our voice without fear of ridicule? And like Tilikum or those dolphins our hearts knowingly cry for as you watch them struggle to find freedom, one has to wonder, will we die out there trying?
This past Christmas, my aunt (who is actually Sam’s aunt by marriage, but has embraced me within the family with such irrefutable warmth, she is my aunt too), surprised me with a gift. We had previously chirped enthusiastically about our shared love of vintage-hunting when she told me about the estate sale of a well-to-do, exceptionally fashionable Nebraska local she had recently visited. I stumbled upon this gift by accident as I left the celebratory Christmas Eve glow to grab something from our room. There on the bed sat an unfussy bag with a craft-paper tag attached. It read: “Keep enjoying the hunt.” Inside was a patent-leather, blood-red trench coat. The jacket fit so perfectly, I nearly thought she had it tailored to my measurements. Soon the tears came, leaving me unable to find words for what such an act of kindness meant to me at that moment, in that season of my life.
There’s no way my aunt could have known what the color red symbolized for me in the year 2022; no way to fully comprehend the weight of her words. And still, somehow, someway, with the assistance of a force much bigger than us both, she understood that coat was mine, that it was for a girl attempting to set the red beast within her free.
So many individuals are frightened by the idea of death. I’m not sure whether it’s a collective fret over what happens after you pass or something only the individual experiencing such a fear could know for sure, but the idea of letting something die feels unbearable to most. My dream of the red beast opened a lifelong search for answers I didn’t even realize I was seeking. What happens then when death is not at the hands of someone else, but of our own volition? What is the appropriate protocol when something deep within the cavernous pit of our being emerges and shouts it will no longer be contained? What must die in order to be reborn?
I can’t pretend to know such things intimately and completely, but this much I know for sure: we must release the beast. We must live in a lifelong pursuit—a never-ending hunt if you will—to understand and name the creature. Not to control it, but to take a long, hard, deep-throated look, no matter how bloodied and brutal the scene, until we reach the soft underbelly and claim it as our own. Sometimes it dies too, the creature that is. It’s the natural rhythm of life. We must stand face-to-face with death to know life. But when we awaken from our slumber, when we feed what’s chewing at our insides to crawl out, when we don the red trench coat, at least we know the path we walk, with all its brutality and all its beauty, is one toward freedom.