Embodying the Wild Woman.

People sometimes ask me about my Instagram name.

Wild Woman Nikita. They want to know what it means. Whether it is a brand. A concept. Something I studied and decided to become.

It is none of those things.

It is just what I have always been.

· · ·

I grew up in Abcoude. A quiet Dutch village. Not exactly the wild. But I could always find the pieces of nature that still felt raw — even there. I was the child who fed a swan and her babies, who kept little frogs and watched them grow, who wandered so far into her own dreaming world that she lost everyone around her without noticing.

A few times a year we drove to Tuscany to visit my grandparents. I loved the connection with my family there and the long meals. But mostly I went straight into the garden to search for lizards in the grass between the fruit trees. Once I found a snake. I was thrilled, but unfortunately nobody believed me.

And then the summers in Liguria — a campsite my family returned to every year. The sea. The boat. Swimming. The smell of the land. I have always felt most alive in Italy. My mother is from Genova. That land is in my blood.

· · ·

At nineteen, I went back to that same campsite in Liguria — this time to work. I learned to speak Italian properly that summer, rode a mountain bike up into the hills in my free time, had long lunches by the sea. And I met a girl from Hungary.

We had an instant connection and became friends. When the summer ended, I got on a plane and went to visit her in Budapest.

Something inside of me woke up on that trip. The freedom of moving toward the unknown. Of arriving somewhere new with no script. I felt it in my whole body — this is what I want. This is what I am made for.

After that, I never stopped.

The following year, at twenty, I flew to Indonesia. Java. Bali. Lombok. The Gili Islands. On Bali, I rented a motorcycle and drove through the entire island alone — just me and my backpack, winding through rice fields and mountain villages and coastlines, arriving at places most tourists never find. No plan. No guide. Just instinct and an open road. I can say that I sometimes got into some difficult situations. Like google maps sending me to a road that didn't really look like a road, but going for it anyway. For a twenty-year-old on her own, it was everything. And it felt completely natural, facing those challenges by myself.

· · ·

Then Thailand. A small island. Barefoot for a month. No shoes, no schedule, no performance.

I swam naked in the sea at night between plankton — the water lit up around me, it was the most magical experience ever. I woke up and didn't know what the day would bring. I ate simply, moved slowly, made things with my hands. I remember making someone a bracelet with specific gemstones. He returned the gift with a symbol of Myanmar, which I still carry with me in my wallet till this day. Someone else who noticed the Wild Woman in me, made me a spear from bamboo. We used it to catch fish. It sounds like nothing. But it felt like everything — like briefly living in a different kind of reality, one that was closer to instinct, closer to the earth, closer to what humans are actually made of. Closer to the way I want to live.

I felt completely free in my body that month. The salt stayed on my skin all day. I didn't wash it off.

· · ·

Then Malaysia. My visa in Thailand expired and I still didn't know where I wanted to go. I took a bus. And then I just started walking — without a destination, without a plan, trusting that something would appear. It did. I ended up on an organic duck farm, holding a baby goat in my arms, laughing.

That is what surrender looks like. And it is never as frightening as the mind says it will be.

· · ·

There is a concept called the Wild Woman archetype. It comes from depth psychology — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves. The idea is ancient and simple: inside every person, there is a part that is untamed. Instinctual. Deeply knowing. Not chaos. Not recklessness. The part that knows before the mind knows. The part that belongs to the earth. The part that cannot be fully domesticated — and was never supposed to be.

Most of us have had this part suppressed. By school. By expectations. By the quiet pressure to be appropriate, contained, productive.

But it does not disappear. It goes underground. And it waits. Until you are ready to meet this truth again.

· · ·

I am not always wild in the obvious sense. I love comfort. A warm home. A slow morning. Coffee on the terrace watching the sea. I love stability — I need it.

But there is a difference between choosing stillness and being forced into it.

The wild part of me is not the part that runs away from life. It is the part that runs toward it — barefoot, eyes open, trusting its own feet to know the ground.

It is why I left the Netherlands.
It is why I drove through Bali alone.
It is why I stayed in Egypt for a year.
It is why I followed an intuition about a house in Salento I had never seen in person.
It is why I am here, writing this at dawn, with the rough Salento rocks right in front of my door and the sound of the sea.

· · ·

I think many people feel this.

A longing they cannot name. A restlessness that does not go away no matter how much they organise, optimise, improve. A part of them that wants to swim naked in the sea at night. That wants to walk without a plan. That wants to feel the salt on their skin all day and not wash it off.

That part is not a problem.

That part is the most alive part of you.

· · ·

This is one of the things I hold space for at Il Sentiero. Not just the healing. Not just the inner work. But the remembering. Of what it feels like to be in your body. In nature. Alive, unhurried, close to something real.

If something in you recognised itself in these words — that is not an accident.

That is it. Saying hello.

— Nikita