Feral Fridays #1

what is feral?

May 30, 2025

I started posting feral and unhinged things on my instagram stories this year (2025). I should qualify that feral for me might be not all that crazy for you, but as someone who has a lot of high school trauma from facebook posts that no one liked or cared about, posting things on any social media—even writing things here—that don’t fit a brand and don’t follow the recommended steps for building a “following” is truly fucking unhinged to me.

Feral is my 2025 word for the year.

It did not start that way.

When doing my planning for 2025 I chose the words: Grace and Power and Self-respect. I turned thirty this year, and to me being thirty was the year I would finally grow up, be the adult I imagined myself to be. I’d feel comfortable in my skin. I’d do the things I wanted to do. I’d have a strong inner scaffolding. The imagery of a bad-ass business woman in high heels clicking down the sidewalk of a huge city on her way to her high-powered job. That was my idea of where I’d be at thirty. Well, that and the image of me working from home, in comfy clothes, doing only the work I wanted to do, and (omg!) going to the grocery store on the weekdays at 1PM because I didn’t have a boss to tell me I couldn’t!

Listen, ten/fifteen years ago that was the dream.

Funny enough I am living one of those dreams, but it doesn’t feel like a dream. I’m more anxious than I’ve ever been. No matter how hard I work, I’m not achieving “success.” I don’t feel safe and fulfilled. Those were the underlying emotions of both of those dreams.

Safety and fulfillment (contentment/peace).

So grace and power and self-respect embodied those feelings for me.

And then my best friend told me to read a taboo romance (I mean, taboo as in Amazon will not even let someone sell this. Let’s just say to the people who think step-brother romance is taboo, this is worse.) And gosh darn it, I loved it. I finished reading it, rated it on StoryGraph, and texted my best friend how funny it will be at the end of the year when I look at my year-end wrap up and the first thing I had read was an ultra-taboo romance.

Sunday January 5, 2025: The Text Exchange that Started it All
Best friend: Didn’t want to interrupt your birthday movie night tradition.
Me: Actually, I didn’t watch any movies. Want to know what I did instead? I swear to god 2025 is going to be my feral year. First book read was [insert taboo book title]. And my birthday was spent writing MGK omegaverse fan fic.
Best friend: OMG STOP
Best friend: holy shit I’m so fucking excited.
Best friend: Omg I’m so pumped for you this year. I want all the feral.

The silliest, most random, beginnings have the most impact.

With my best friend’s encouragement, my feral year commenced.

I wrote unhinged MGK fan fiction that had no commercial viability. Because I knew no one except me would ever like it.* I wrote it without keeping in mind how an audience would perceive it.

*Me and my bestie and the twelve people on A03 who gave it kudos—shout out to my fellow unhinged feral people!

My next feral act was more a realization that I’ve always been feral at heart, but ashamed (which is decidedly not feral). Amazon decided to change its ebook policies, so I had to download the epubs of every book I purchased from their site or else lose them, which meant if I ever decided to use an ereader that wasn’t a kindle, I’d have to repurchase all the books. In doing this, I found out the very first ebook that I ever purchased was…

Drum roll please

I’ve never been ashamed of being a romance reader. I was proudly reading FictionPress stuff all through high school, but there was a time when I blushed when I told people I read fifty shades. There was a reason I bought the books on an ereader and not the paperback copies.

My official definition of feral:

Feral (adjective)

Resembling a wild & self-possessed woman, especially after escape from captivity or domestication

In other words, “Doing whatever you want and having the power to ignore your inner & outer critics, the grace to smile to yourself while doing it, and the self-respect to not let anyone convince you that you can’t.”

I’m doing all the things I want.

I’m saying all the things I want.

I’m writing long morning pages (journal entries) of temper tantrums and jealous fits of rage and disappointment and grief.

I’m giving up on all my dreams to have writing ever make more than a couple hundred dollars. I’m giving up on my dream I’ll ever break even on what I spent for editing and cover designs of my first three books. I’m giving up trying to make instagram and tiktok work. I’m giving up on thinking that more than a few hundred people will ever read my books.

It feels naughty and deviant to write this in a post that I’ll make public. It feels like I’m being a bad girl for not following the American hustle culture ethos of positivity and manifesting my goals and not stopping until I get them. It feels lazy, which is the ultimate moral sin of an American.

But most of all it feels fucking wonderful.

I’m quitting a part of my full-time job that I only forced myself to continue to do because if I can make money then I should.

I’m writing books and fan fiction that will never pay my bills. I’m wasting time.

I’m paying for a website that is beautiful and pleasing to me. I’m paying for stock art so I can make covers for books that no mass of people will ever read. I’m posting on instagram despite not getting more than my three to five instagram friends to like the post. (thanks guys!! love ya!!) I’m doing it all shamelessly.

I’m not writing this post about giving up to cry about not getting readers, not getting likes, because I want sympathy or pity.

This isn’t a “poor me” post. This is my fucking freedom post.

I have two subscribers to this Substack. One of them is my other email address. The other is some poor internet stranger who probably accidentally subscribed. I feel so fucking free by saying this in a public way. A public way that no one will ever read, but public nonetheless. I feel like I don’t have to fake an image of things working anymore. I don’t have to post like the authors who know they’ll get likes and shares. I don’t have to be a professional. I don’t have to post/write with the voice of someone who has filtered what they’ve said to come off “just right.” I don’t have to write like the authors who have to be careful about offending and worry about how they are being perceived.

I’m not being perceived at all!

I don’t need to rebel against the system. I don’t need to complain about algorithms anymore. Because rebelling is still fighting against something. I’ve simply stopped fighting.

And that is feral, to me.

I want to end with some imagery that I’ve been replaying in my head every time I feel like I’m slipping back into a pre-feral phase. (Because I do slip. I get jealous of the people having amazing success with their books. I have moments of grief that my writing isn’t good enough. I have moments of rage when books that aren’t all that good (to me) get astounding praise and success. I’m fucking human, alright? But this imagery helps relax those nervous system responses.)

There’s this little old woman in a garden.

Her garden plot is beside other people's garden plots for as far as the eye can see, and people walk between the garden plots and point at the best ones.

They “ooooh” and “ahhh” at the giant beautiful roses and orchids.

This little old lady never leaves her garden. She crouches down and cups her little plants in her palm. Some of them have sun spots. Some have bugs chewing the leaves. Some of them are pristine but tiny.

No one comes to look at this little old woman's garden.

People pass by, but they don’t stop. She never notices though because her back is to the path.

She's too focused on her little plants.

She coos to them and sings to them.

Sometimes she sits next to them and just stares in awe.

She looks at her plants through queer eyes, a queer lens. Her plants do not fit a traditional standard of beauty. She doesn’t love them despite their flaws. She doesn’t even love them because of their flaws. She doesn’t see flaws. She doesn’t know what flaws are.

The magazines don't take pictures and the people don't line up to talk about how great her garden is, and she doesn't notice their absence.

She's enraptured by her garden.

She doesn't need her plants to be big beautiful roses that everyone will like. She likes these misshapen, odd-ball plants that are so unique no one has them. She likes them because they sprung from her care.

She doesn't look at anyone else's garden so she doesn't even really know that they aren’t "right."

Or rather, the one time she did turn around (a bunny was munching on something and she needed to shoo him away), she caught sight of the garden plots that everyone huddled around. She scratched her head at this. Every plot with a crowd had big beautiful roses and orchids.

"They're all the same, though?" She shrugged and went back to her business.

I tell this old woman's story to myself almost every day. Sometimes I add in conflicts like rain pelting and ruining some plants or blistering sun that she has to shield them from.

Some days I think about how her body aches and is sore from constant tending, but that’s okay. She just lays down beside her plants and whispers to them.

I tell this story and variations of it over and over. It's my comfort thought.

This old woman who has long flowing 70’s style clothes with butterfly sleeves and swishy pants. A yoga teacher's calm energy. A hippie’s carefree attitude. A queer's vision.

She holds herself tall, posture straight (when she's not bending over her plants tending to them). Her chin is high. Her smile is slight but always there.

This is a woman with grace and power and self-respect.

This woman is feral to the rest of the world. She’s a problem because if you stop measuring your worth by how much you’re producing and other traditional forms of success, then the capitalist machine cannot squeeze you for all your worth. If you stop being afraid of failing and giving up, if you stop being ashamed of who you are...they can't control your behavior anymore.

That's a goddamn threat.

This old woman in the garden is a threat. This old woman in the garden is feral.

~~This old woman in the garden is who I aspire to be.~~

This old woman in the garden is me.