Saying Yes to Wildness
What if we have to lose our voice to find the one meant for us?
“I went from bitch to witch.”
Yoko Ono says in the documentary One to One: John & Yoko.
When she first got with John, she was a “bitch”. When the Beatles broke up, she became a “witch.” The relentless attacks on her character and physical appearance led to her developing a stutter for the first time in her life, second-guessing herself, and eventually losing her voice altogether.
If Yoko Ono’s voice could be robbed — a successful artist and leader of the Fluxus movement, whose life work had been to question the status quo — what does that mean for the rest of us? Do more trailblazing women follow this pattern than we realize? Start wild, lose their voice, and fear being seen — only to emerge wilder and more equipped to lead others into wildness?
After the Beatles broke up, John and Yoko moved to New York City. Yoko lost her stutter and reclaimed her voice, releasing the song, Yes, I'm a Witch:
Yes, I’m a witch, I’m a bitch
Each time we don’t say what we wanna say, we’re dying
Each time we don’t say how we feel, we’re dying
Each time we do what we wanna do, we’re living
Each time we open our minds to what we see, we’re living
So, what breaks us?
I imagine Yoko dealt with hate prior to getting into bed with John — all wild women do. We don’t care — until suddenly, we do.
So, what changes? What makes us scared of our own voice?
We feel we have something to lose — a person, a reputation, or a dream. That fear makes us cling tightly to what we have or chase what we think we need in order to keep what we have (even if what we have is no good for us).
Maybe, in those early years of their relationship, when John was still a Beatle, and Yoko began to stutter, she feared that the hate aimed at her would eventually affect John, that she might lose him, that the artistic life she imagined for them might never come to be.
I’m speculating, of course. I have never endured as much public hate as she did, but I have lost my voice, and I have suffered from deep levels of fear.
From Wild to Tame.
In college, some might have called me wild. I said yes to most things — danced on tables, climbed forbidden roofs, and snuck into the hockey rink after hours. I lived for adventure, not reputation or consequences.
That changed my senior year when I was faced with the existential question: how would I “make something of myself.” Maybe the anxiety came because none of the career fair tents appealed to me, maybe it came because I wanted to work for a magazine but was told it was a dying industry, or maybe it came because a high school friend once sternly told me, “You have to make something of yourself. You’re going to Yale; you can’t waste it.”
I had made it through Yale — decent grades, good times — but as graduation loomed, I suddenly felt I had something to lose, something to prove, and no idea how to do it.
I was hired by Snapchat because I wrote an article about the app for my school newspaper. My title was “Gluten Free Black Bear”. I was tossed from project to project and called a “fuzzy” because I had a Bachelor of Arts instead of Science. The college version of myself — the wild one — was slowly dying.
I constantly felt like I was being watched and judged. That I needed to prove my worth, that failure could knock on my door at any moment. My voice became a clone of others, no longer my own.
Through a mix of luck, saying yes to more work, and no to party invites, I found myself creating and running the Our Story feature, which turned user-generated content into multi-perspective narratives. In some ways, I had made it: I built and led a team of 80, our stories garnering over 40 million views a day.
But I lived in even more fear now.
Fear of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, that one of my direct reports might say or do the wrong thing. Fear that tomorrow I might lose it all.
And then, I lost it all. I was replaced as the department head and resigned to random content projects.
After the re-org, I sat in a room full of men as they riffed on ideas. My boss turned to me.
“What do you think, Chloë? What should we do? I’m not hearing any ideas from you.”
I had no more ideas left; all my passion had been extinguished. I just wanted to be told what to do and be left alone to do it. Being tame felt easier than being wild.
Losing everything is the only way to find what matters.
I didn’t truly find my voice again for many years — until, yet again, I lost everything I thought I wanted.
At first, I panicked. I cried. I scrambled to rebuild. But with the pieces so shattered, my only choice was to take time to sit with myself and see what I had avoided for so long. This time forced me to consolidate and have patience. It gave me space to say yes again — yes to frivolous invites and trying new things.
Through this time, I learned that as long as I stayed connected to myself and protected the space and time needed to nurture that connection, I would never fear loss — I would have all I needed.
And the more I understood this, the wilder my voice became.
Our Circle of Wild Women
The Sol Circle community is made up of wild women.
Some have always been wild. Some have lost their voices and found stronger ones. Others are in the process.
But in these Circles, we reconnect to our truest selves. To each other. To the power of speaking boldly, acting freely, and living fully.
We learn to say yes to our wildness. And no to anyone who tries to tame us.
Saying yes.
The story goes that Yoko met John during her exhibition at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966. John’s favorite piece, and what led to his first conversation with Yoko, was titled ‘Ceiling Painting.’ Visitors climbed a white ladder and gazed through a spyglass to read a single tiny word on the ceiling — “Yes.”
In a world that often convinces us to say no, may we all keep saying yes.
Yes, to connection.
Yes, to frivolous invites.
Yes, to our deepest desires.
Yes, to the parts of us that others try to silence.
And most of all, yes to our wildness.
Have you tried a Storytelling Circle on Sol yet? Join a Circle, meet the community, and feel the magic of sharing your story and listening to others’!
Comments? Reflections? Stories? Would love to read them!!
The shared experience of losing our voices, especially as women, is so relatable. For me, it happened just a little bit at a time over a lifetime.
Religion taught me conformity. It taught me submission, humility, and to confuse obedience with goodness. Society taught conformity, too. Kids bully, adults make comments...and over the years, my childhood exuberance and self-expression were watered down and diluted.
My life slowly became less about self-expression, art, and joy, and more about just being accepted and fitting into what I thought were social norms.
But life has a way of slicing through the layers of shields and protections we learn to build, and it often takes pain, disillusionment, and grief to get to the place you're talking about.
Thank you for this.
Yes, to voice. Yes, to remembering. Yes, to the women who refuse to stay tame.
Chloë — this one left me buzzing.
Here’s to being the witch again. 🔥