When I Grow Up I Want to Be Feral and Free

A manifesto for the chronically well-behaved

There's something peculiar about the way we learned to tame ourselves. Like muscle memory from years of being told to sit still, speak softer, take up less space.

Yesterday I caught myself doing it again—that instinctive flinch toward proper, that automatic apology for being too much, too loud, too alive.

You know what I mean. The way we dim our laugh in coffee shops. How we filter our weird playlists when someone asks to see our Spotify. The Instagram grid we curate to look "professional enough." The constant calibration of how much personality is too much personality for a Tuesday morning meeting.

But lately I've been noticing something else—little moments of rebellion. The gray-haired woman in bright yellow rain boots on a sunny day. My crypto bro coworker humming Taylor Swift in the elevator. The quiet accountant with a secret tattoo of constellations mapping her spine. The corporate lawyer back home who spends his weekends foraging mushrooms and talking to trees.

And I can't help but wonder—what if we all just stopped pretending?

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The quiet resistance of being yourself

I remember the exact moment I decided to stop performing normalcy. I was sitting in a meeting, wearing shoes that hurt my feet because they looked "professional," holding back an idea because it might sound too out there, when I watched my colleague explain her weekend plans with complete, unfiltered joy.

She was going mushroom foraging, she told us, her eyes bright with excitement. And not a single person laughed.

That's the thing about authenticity—it's contagious. Like yawns or laughter or revolution. One person claims their right to be weird, and suddenly the air shifts.

Permission granted. Barriers broken. Possibilities unleashed.

The unexpected math of freedom

Here's what they don't tell you about growing up: every time you shrink yourself to fit someone else's expectations, you're not just losing pieces of yourself—you're teaching everyone around you to do the same.

But the reverse is also true. Every time you choose to be fully, unapologetically yourself, you're creating space for others to do the same.

It's simple mathematics, really—the exponential growth of personal freedom.

One person decides to wear their favorite outfit even though it's "too bright." Another starts talking about their passion for collecting vintage toasters. Someone else admits they prefer reading children's books in their thirties.

And suddenly, we're all a little more free.

The unexpected price of proper

What no one talks about is how exhausting it is to be well-behaved all the time. The constant mental calculations—is this laugh too loud? Is this story too weird? Is this outfit too bold? Is this passion too intense?

We've turned ourselves into human autocorrect, always running in the background, always checking for errors in our own expression.

I spent three hours last week practicing my "professional" email voice. You know the one. That perfect blend of friendly but not too friendly, confident but not too assertive, competent but somehow also warm and approachable.

Meanwhile, my actual voice sits unused in my throat, like a song I've forgotten the words to.

The wild thing is, we're all doing this. All of us, sitting in our separate corners, carefully filing down our edges, never realizing we're all just as tired of the performance.

The biology of becoming

I've been people-watching lately, searching for clues of untamed humanity. Looking for the ones who never got the memo about being proper, or maybe just chose to delete it. The ones who make life feel more like an adventure and less like a performance review.

Like the woman at the farmers market who spent 20 minutes telling me about the secret lives of honeybees, her eyes lit up with a passion that would be labeled "too intense" in any corporate setting. Or my old art teacher who still wears paint-splattered overalls to fancy restaurants because "life's too short for clothes that don't tell stories."

These are the people who remind me that being human doesn't have to mean being handled. That maybe growing up isn't about learning to behave, but about remembering how to be brave enough to just be.

I keep a mental collection of these everyday rebels:

• The guy who turned his suburban backyard into a mini butterfly sanctuary because "the HOA can't regulate magic"

• My friend who starts dance parties in grocery store aisles

• The woman at the coffee shop who reads poetry to her plants while they wait in line

• The accountant who does tarot readings on his lunch break

These aren't just characters in the background of my life anymore. They're blueprints for possibility. Living proof that there's more than one way to be a grown-up in this world.

The revolution will be weird

Maybe that's what growing up should really mean. Not learning to behave, but unlearning the need to perform. Not fitting in, but finding your own shape and refusing to apologize for its edges.

I'm starting to think being "too much" is actually just being enough. That all those parts of ourselves we were taught to tame—the loud laugh, the weird interests, the unfiltered enthusiasm—might be exactly what we need more of in this world.

So here's my promise to my future self: I will grow up to be feral and free. I will take up space and make noise and love things too deeply. I will wear clothes that make me feel alive and dance in grocery stores and name the plants in my garden after obscure philosophers.

And I hope you'll join me. Because the world doesn't need more well-behaved people. It needs more of us being completely, radically ourselves.

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