Zebra medicine

On being visible, vulnerable, and wild in a world that teaches us to disappear.

As a child, I learned to disappear.
In rooms where my difference was thunder, I made myself lightning—brilliant but fleeting, gone before anyone could truly see me.

The dissonance of never quite belonging planted seeds of fear beneath my skin. I became a displaced creature, carrying an inner geography that matched no outer landscape I could find.

Mary Oliver once asked what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life. And I wonder, what is true wildness. Is embodying freedom and courage, letting my unguarded self be witnessed, stripes and scars all visible under this open sky?

A friend recently spoke of the textures of silence that live between us. I began to pay closer attention. What I found was; there is a silence that separates, and a silence that connects. A silence that severs and which threads us together. Each holding a thousand tongues.

My dysphoria felt like a secret dialect I believed no one could speak. It lodged in my body; an echo chamber where the only commerce was absence.

David Whyte speaks of the courage of presence. But what presence can there be when your very being
feels like a question no one asked?
I've been vanishing for years,
each disappearance a small death,
each isolation another room in my exile.

The zebras know something I had forgotten. Their stripes aren't camouflage but connection— each pattern unique yet part of the living mosaic.They stand in their difference, together, finding shelter in being fully seen.

There's an ancient agreement written in their bodies: to be seen is not weakness but belonging. To have needs is not failure, but birthright.

David Abram reminds us that we are not separate from the breathing world. Our isolation is illusion.
Even the lone wolf howls to be heard.

So I begin —

Standing at the edge of my own becoming, hesitant, like morning fog not yet ready to lift. Learning to build trust in the space between heartbeats; where vulnerability waits like a seed beneath the scorched earth of old fear, patient for rain.

Sounding my truth not because I am healed, but because hearding, and being heard is the healing.

This morning, I placed my displacement on the table,
not as confession but as invitation.
My friend reached across the distance
and for a moment, we were zebras together, finding safety in being witnessed in our wounding.

Like zebras standing visible on the savanna, we find safety not in hiding, but in the herd — in community. Not through the contortion or erasure of self, nor adopting “herd mentality” but through recognition of our individuality as essential ingredients for the collective soul soup. We navigate our way home not through solo pilgrimage or vanishing acts, but through gestures of self-love. Through the quiet courage it takes to be seen, to be recognised — in all our beautiful, broken particularity.