So, You Leave Behind the Hopeless Flirt

It began simply enough: an invitation to write about my life.

I thought it would be a playful collection of essays,

Stories about heartache and flirtation,

About the laughter and the longing,

About the wild edges of love and the tender fumbling of connection.

But what I discovered along the way was something else entirely.

A truth so quiet and so insistent that it rearranged me:

Disconnection is the great sickness of our time.

It hides beneath imposter syndrome.

It seeps into the exhaustion we call burnout.

It shows up

In the loneliness that lingers even when we’re surrounded by people,

In the way our worth gets tangled in performance,

In the endless striving that never seems to arrive anywhere real.

And yet, somewhere within me, I knew the antidote.

I had known it since I was a child.

Because in The Wild, I never doubted my worth.

In The Wild, I belonged without question.

That’s what I wanted in love too.

Not possession,

Not performance.

But presence.

To be in a relationship that made me feel as supported, beautiful, and free as I did beneath the open sky.

The Hopeless Flirt

When the phrase Hopeless Flirt first came to mind, it made me laugh.

It was playful, cheeky, a name that gave me permission to write without taking myself too seriously. But beneath the laughter was longing.

I began writing to make sense of myself

Of the way I stumbled through intimacy,

Of why connection felt both irresistible and elusive,

Of why I carried a constant ache of not-quite-belonging.

What started as lessons in charm and mischief grew into meditations on solitude, play, courage, and love.

However, from the very beginning I understood that I wanted to write about

Deeply important topics surrounding connection,

In a lighthearted way that would draw people in,

Instead of pushing them away.

The Great Turning

The deeper I wrote, the more the essays revealed themselves.

They were not just reflections, they were waypoints on a map.

A map back to what I had always known:

Joy is not frivolous,

Celebration is not optional,

Love is not a prize to be earned.

They are the very keys to our wholeness.

I came to see that everything I had lived

The heartbreaks,

The laughter,

The longing

Had been preparing me.

My past wasn’t a collection of mistakes or delays. It was training.

Because here is the treasure:

When we reconnect

When we belong again

To ourselves,

To each other,

To the living world

We begin to celebrate life.

And celebration is not escape.

It is power.

It is the force that

Lifts us beyond burnout,

Dissolves the illusion of not-enough,

Shows us that our brilliance was never in doubt.

Leaving the Hopeless Flirt Behind

So yes, I left the Hopeless Flirt behind.

Not because she was wrong, but because she was my beginning.

She taught me

How to laugh at myself,

How to open my heart even when it trembled,

How to risk being silly in the name of being real.

She wrote her way into The Wild, and there she found me

Whole,

Unguarded,

Radiant.

The greatest discovery was not that I had stories to tell, but that those stories could guide others home to themselves.

That my fumbling words might become lanterns.

That what felt like personal struggle could serve as collective medicine.

Because if we can remember how to belong

If we can dare to celebrate life itself

Then perhaps we are

Strong enough,

Playful enough,

Alive enough

To solve humanity’s greatest problems.

And maybe that is the real art of flirtation:

Not seduction, but invitation.

An invitation to step closer.

To each other.

To the earth.

To joy.

To love.