I, the fool
On freeing ourselves from cultural expectations
Welcome to Rewilding the Feminine, my newsletter on my search for a wilder and more authentic life. In my letters, I share the insights and questions I encountered on this big journey called life – the biggest of all being what it is that makes me feel both wildly alive and at home within myself. I would love it if you’d do the same. You can share your insights and experiences in the comments or reply to this email!
It’s Tuesday night, and after an hour of intuitively moving my body in the ugliest and most foolish way possible, I return to myself once more and find the courage to press send on this letter. Practice what you preach.
I wrote this piece on Saturday morning when I was up early after a good night’s sleep. I sneaked out of bed, put on the kettle, lit a candle, and sat on my yoga mat as the night slowly turned into day.
The theme of the past week was coming back to myself. After a stressful month at work, I left home for a few days to decompress under the Malagan sun. A daily yoga practice washed my insides clean, and the debris left my body through streams of hot tears and a shaking body.
For a few weeks, I’d been fighting myself. I was trying to stick with something that clearly wasn’t working. The potential of honor and validation stoked the fire of my ego, but the truth is that I long for peace and sanity. Above all, a work environment in which I can be myself. I worked hard to create these things regardless of my surroundings, but being part of the system, conformity snuck in.
Only with some physical distance between us was I able to reflect and say out loud what my body had been trying to tell me the whole time: this is not what I want anymore. I thought I had said goodbye to the girl who would do anything for a promotion many moons ago, but she was still part of me and might be forever.
Letting go again of this part of myself, the successful careerist with lots of potential, felt destabilizing, foolish, and freeing at the same time. Destabilizing because it inherently raised the question of who are you if not her? Foolish because it felt very counter-cultural. And freeing because this time I could trust that I’d find the answer to that question in the space that emerged by letting go.
At the end of the retreat, I pulled a card: the fool. An ancient archetype that invites us to be true to ourselves and reminds us of the unlimited potential and spontaneity inherent in every moment. How fitting.
In medieval times, the fool was a person who could do whatever he wanted. He was unburdened by culture’s expectations and lived outside of the hierarchy. He was the only one who could make fun of the King and point out his flaws.
In modern times, the fool represents the in-between: life between the beginning and ending of things, where we don’t know what the future will look like. The fool reminds us that to live is to be walking to the edge of what we know – a very counter-cultural thing to do in a world that tells us we need to have everything figured out before we can move forward.
The fool flips things upside down and around. When culture and ego say that we must be as productive as possible to be worthy, the fool says we must be as unproductive as possible to be true to ourselves. The fool frees us from unattainable cultural standards that tell us to move at a certain pace, ignore our intuition, and overrule our bodies.
But I wonder: are we really foolish by freeing ourselves from the shackles of cultural norms and expectations and following our hearts? Or is it our culture that perceives listening to our intuition and dancing to our own soul song as the craziest thing we can do?
I think it is the most courageous, fulfilling, and life-giving thing any of us can do. And I think we need more people who dare to be brave in their contrarian wisdom and trust themselves in embodying their own foolish path. People who lead with their heart instead of their head.
The day I returned to work, they asked me to stay on the project. I graciously declined.
✍🏻 How do you embody the fool archetype in your career or outside of it and gather the confidence to keep walking your own path? Where in your life are you currently on the verge of the unknown, and can you use some of the fool’s courage to keep going without knowing what the future will look like?