-Andrada Costoiu
I’ve been reflecting on myself and us —people.
There are days when I dream of wild horses — manes tangled in the wind, muscles moving like water, eyes full of something untamed. They run across an open plain, not toward anything, not away from anything, but simply because they can. Watching them, even in imagination, awakens something in me.
We all begin that way, don’t we? Born wild in spirit. As children, we live without the boundaries that later define us. We dance when the music starts, laugh too loud, and ask too many questions. We are muscle and heart. The world feels infinite, like a field with no fences. But then, slowly, the taming begins.
It doesn’t happen all at once. It starts with small instructions: Sit still. Be quiet. Don’t make a scene. Speak only when spoken to. We learn that love and acceptance often depend on our ability to shrink ourselves — to become manageable, predictable, safe. The wildness that once connected us to the wind and sky is slowly traded for approval. We are taught to obey, to be predictable, to keep our voices low and our movements measured. And by the time we reach adulthood, we are taught that freedom is reckless, we learn to trade our curiosity for control, our wonder for stability. Without knowing, we become fluent in the language of restraint, even as some part of us still dreams in the dialect of wind and sky.
But here’s the thing: the wild doesn’t vanish just because we’ve built fences around it. It waits. Quietly. Patiently. Inside us.
Sometimes it surfaces in the most unexpected ways — in the restlessness that keeps us awake at night, like me now, as I am writing this, or in the moments when we drive just to feel the road stretch out before us and feel the wind in our hair. It’s like a pulse…. that reminds us there’s more to life than productivity and permission.
Society, of course, rewards the tamed. It praises the steady, the predictable, the ones who color within the lines. But beneath that civility lies a dull ache, a quiet grief for the parts of ourselves we’ve silenced in exchange for belonging.
Yet the truth is, no amount of control or success can replace the aliveness that comes from feeling uncontained. The wild horse inside us doesn’t care for perfection. It only knows the language of movement, intuition, and instinct. It’s there, inside us, and if you listen, you’ll hear how he asks questions you’ve forgotten how to answer: When was the last time you ran without purpose? When did you last let the wind undo you? When did you trust a desire before you explained it? What have you caged in the name of being good? When did you last feel joy that didn’t need a reason?
The tragedy of growing up isn’t that we stop dreaming, it’s that we stop giving ourselves permission to live like dreamers. We exchange our internal wilderness for calendars, contracts, and expectations. We convince ourselves that being tamed is the same as being safe. But even the safest pasture is still a cage if your spirit remembers the open sky.
And yet, we need both — the wild and the gentle, the wind and the weight. To be fully human is to live in that tension. Freedom without connection becomes loneliness; structure without freedom becomes suffocation. The art, I think, lies in learning how to keep your wildness alive without letting it destroy you — to run when you can, rest when you must, and never forget what it feels like to gallop.
I think about this often: how many of us spend our lives yearning for something we can’t quite name. We chase validation, love — all in search of the same feeling the wild horses already know. To exist without apology. To trust movement more than fear. To belong to ourselves.
When we see something or someone unrestrained — an artist lost in creation, a child laughing at nothing, we feel that flicker of recognition. Our own wildness rises, we remember, if only for a second, what it feels like to be free.
But then the world calls us back — meetings, bills, expectations, obligations. We return to our routines, walking carefully so as not to disturb the order we’ve built. Still, somewhere deep in the marrow, the memory of the wild hums quietly. And if we listen closely, we can still hear the thunder of hooves.
And there’s beauty in being tamed, too —in creating lives of meaning and connection. But it becomes dangerous when we forget that taming was supposed to be a choice, not a sentence. The goal was never to kill the wild, but to carry it wisely.
The older I get, the more I realize that the wild doesn’t live outside of civilization — it lives within our capacity to feel deeply. To be moved by sunsets, remade by love. It lives in the tears I don’t hide, in the dreams I still chase despite the odds. Freedom, I’ve learned, isn’t the absence of structure, but it’s the courage to remain true to yourself within it.
Cioran once wrote that “man starts over again every time he is alone,” and perhaps that is what I’m doing now—at 5 a.m., as I write this. I am returning to that image of wild horses. Running. Breathing. Free. Not to escape the world, but to remember how to inhabit it more fully. Because maybe the point is not to choose between being wild and being human, but to remember that we are both : the thunder and the quiet field after the storm.
In the end, perhaps the most radical act is not rebellion, but acknowledgment — to look at the life we’ve built and hear the gallop inside it. To sit at a desk or drive through traffic or stand in a crowded room, and feel, somewhere beneath the noise, the whisper: You were never meant to be entirely tamed.
Wild horses are almost gone now — rare, protected, fenced in for their own survival. But we can be different. It’s 5 a.m., the birds are awake, and so is something in me. Let’s not live fenced-in lives. Let us widen the horizon inside us, again and again, until fences become impossible and the wild remembers its home.
