The Wolf Is Not Tame

“If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

This line is a wink and a warning.
It’s a reclamation.
To be called defiant is to have resisted control.
To be called incorrigible is to have refused to be ‘fixed’.
To be called impossible is to have made others uncomfortable by staying true to yourself.

I’ve been all three.

I’ve always felt like a wolf.

The lone part. The pack too.

Even before I had the words, I loved solitude. The wildness of silence. The clarity of being alone, where the noise of the world couldn’t get in. I didn’t need validation. I needed space. I needed to remember who I was. That’s the lone wolf in me — the one who runs not from rejection, but toward freedom. She’s never needed a leash to know her place.

But then there’s the pack. The soul family. The chosen ones. That’s where my fiercest loyalty lives. The wolf doesn’t join just any tribe — she joins the one her soul recognises. And when I protect, I do it with every tooth bared. The pack isn’t about submission. It’s about contribution. Mutual trust. Belonging. Honesty. If we can’t be honest, you’re not in the pack. Simple as that.

I stand with the pack my lone wolf believes in.

I’ve been called defiant since I could speak. Insubordinate, even. But it wasn’t rebellion for the sake of noise — it was always about truth. I spoke up when something was wrong. I stood for what felt right — and I did it with a fire I never tried to hide.

Defiance, for me, is not tantrum. It’s not recklessness.
It’s discernment. Agency. Backbone.
It is grace, laced with steel.

Incorrigible? Maybe. But not in the way they meant it.
If it means I can’t be tamed, that I won’t be softened into someone else’s version of acceptability — then yes. Let it be known:

I serve no master. I serve my lone wolf — and my pack benefits from that.

And impossible?

Well.

Maybe I’m impossible because I’m hitting against something in them they don’t recognise.
Because usually when someone calls you a name, it’s not about what you’re doing — it’s about what they can’t face.
Their fear. Their limit. Their unexamined insecurities.

The world punishes women like that.

Not always overtly.
Sometimes in closed doors. Unsent invites. Quiet guilt.
The suggestion that your silence is concerning — when what they really mean is:

“Your silence makes me uncomfortable. I can’t feel who I am without the noise.”

But I am not lost in my silence. I am recalibrating.
Because silence is not absence — it is a tuning fork. A reckoning.
And the wild knows how to listen to it.

I’ve shrunk. I’ve softened. I’ve been palatable.

And I can’t do it anymore.

Because the cost is too high.
It’s a prison.
You’re not roaming anymore — you’re caged.
And when you cage something wild, it doesn’t become calm. It just suffers in silence, until one day it tears through the bars.

I’ve felt that suffocation. I’ve lived the performance.
The diluted voice. The twisted spine from bending too much.
All to avoid drama. To keep peace.

But that isn’t peace.
It’s betrayal.

Not just of self — but of every young girl watching, learning, mimicking your silence.

I won’t pass that down.
Not to my daughter. Not to myself.

And so this is the moment I name aloud:

I am not there yet — but I am reckoning.
I am remembering the taste of wild.
I am working on my freedom from the cage I tried to decorate.
Because the truest sense of the lone wolf — my wolf — draws her power from the ground, from the air, from the elements that do not ask for permission to exist.

I don’t have all the answers.
But I know this:

I am writing from the threshold — in the tension between recognition and reclamation.

I do not exist to be palatable.
I exist to be free.