Reclaim Your Wild

I have signed off every email for years with two words. Here is what they finally mean.

Stay wild. It began as a sign-off, the way sign-offs do — something I typed without thinking very hard about it, that felt more like me than kind regards ever had. It sat at the bottom of thousands of emails before I understood that it was not a flourish. It was an instruction I had been giving myself.

The wild is the part of you that work taught you to put away. It is the version of you that was too much, too different, too unconventional, too specific to be useful at a desk. Everyone has one. Most people can tell you exactly what theirs is within about four seconds of being asked, which tells you how close to the surface it sits and how carefully it is being held down.

Where the wild goes

It does not vanish. That would be easier. It goes somewhere quieter and it waits.

You will find it in the hobby you do not mention at work. The way you decorate the room nobody visits. The thing you read at midnight. The version of yourself that appears on holiday, briefly, and then gets folded up and packed away with the suitcase. It is not gone. It is stored.

And storing it has a cost, which is that everything you build while the wild is packed away is built by a partial person. Your business, your brand, the way you speak to your clients — all of it assembled by the acceptable half of you, working alone, doing the job of two.

Why business is where this matters most

There is a reason this shows up most sharply in small business, and it is not sentimental. It is structural.

A large organisation can afford for its people to be partial. It has scale, budget, and brand recognition to compensate. You have none of those things. What you have is specificity — the fact that you, particularly, see this problem in a way the big firm does not. Specificity is the only advantage you have, and it lives entirely in the parts of yourself you have been taught to leave out.

Which means that for you, being fully yourself is not indulgence. It is strategy. It is the most commercially sensible thing you could possibly do, and the fact that it also feels like relief is a bonus rather than a warning sign.

Reclaiming, not revealing

I want to be careful here, because reclaim is not the same as reveal. This is not about performing your inner life for an audience. Nobody owes anybody their whole biography.

Reclaiming means taking something back into use. It means the parts of you that have been in storage get to come to work — not as content, not as a story you tell, but as something that shapes how you think and how you decide and what you build. It might never be visible at all. It will always be felt.

So: stay wild. Not as a sign-off. As a statement of intent, and the only useful piece of brand advice I have ever given anyone.

This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.