I Think I’m a Goddamn Cheetah
On the life you almost lived — and the one still waiting
I was twenty-three years old on the California coast when I first understood what it felt like to want something so completely that the wanting itself was the whole point.
We had stopped in Santa Cruz. And sitting outside a car dealership, like it had been waiting specifically for me, was a cherry red convertible Mustang.
I turned to my boyfriend and said… let’s buy it. We can drive it back instead of flying.
I had the money. I had the feeling. The Pacific was right there. The coast highway was right there. I was twenty-three and alive and this car was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and I wanted to say yes to it with every cell in my body.
What I needed was one person to say yes with me.
What I got was a string of why nots.
Logical reasons. Practical concerns. Sensible objections I don’t even remember now because the only thing I remember is the feeling of the wanting going quiet.
We flew home.
I never thought flying home was the right choice. Just the sensible one.
For a long time I thought that story was about a car.
It wasn’t about a car.
It was about what I did with the wanting. The way I let it get talked out of me. The way I translated someone else’s hesitation into my own and called it maturity.
There was another version of my life I used to think about.
Selling everything. A simple house near the coast of Vancouver. Dogs. A garden. Making a living through artistic pursuits. Drilling down to what actually mattered, nature, creativity, a life lived close to the bone.
Instead I ended up in a more expensive house. A more complicated life. Further from the coast and further from the version of myself that had stood in that car dealership at twenty-three feeling like the whole world was available to her.
I have spent a lot of my life being very good at being sensible.
I was walking recently, earbuds in, audiobook playing, when I heard Glennon Doyle describe a cheetah at a zoo.
The cheetah lives with a companion dog. The dog keeps it calm. Manageable. Safe enough for captivity. They are genuinely bonded. The dog is not a villain in this story. The dog is just the adaptation. The thing the cheetah learned to need in order to survive an environment that was never built for what it actually is.
But sometimes the cheetah catches a scent on the air.
And something ancient wakes up.
Not something new. Something remembered.
I went back and listened to it several times standing there on the street.
It made me feel something physical in my chest.
And then it made me sad.
I know what the companion dog is.
The companion dog is every sensible choice that talked me out of the wanting. Every why not that replaced a yes. Every complicated expensive life I built instead of the simple true one. Every time I felt the scent on the air and walked back into the enclosure because staying felt safer than the alternative.
The companion dog is the oversized sweatshirt. The performance of a self I thought was required. The decades of feeling things deeply and wondering why nobody else seemed to, and learning, slowly, to feel them a little less loudly so the room stayed comfortable.
I have been a very well-adapted cheetah.
From a young age I wondered why other people didn’t seem to feel things as deeply as I did.
The passion that came naturally to me, the ideas, the wanting, the physical feeling of inspiration hitting like weather. It seemed to exhaust or confuse the people around me. So I learned to modulate it. To present a more reasonable version. To let the why nots win often enough that nobody felt threatened by what I actually was.
I thought that was wisdom.
I think now it was just a very long adaptation.
I’m over fifty now.
And something has shifted in a way I don’t have precise language for yet.
Not a crisis. Not a dramatic reinvention. More like… the scent is in the air again.
The trail running that made me feel powerful before I let it slip. The writing that I always wanted to do and am finally doing. The building of something from scratch in a foreign city at an age when most people are consolidating rather than beginning.
The cheetah catching the air and remembering.
I am not becoming something new.
I am remembering what I already was.
A cheetah in a zoo is not a failed cheetah.
It is a cheetah in the wrong environment, doing what it must to survive, waiting, perhaps without knowing it is waiting — for the moment the air changes.
You are not a failed version of yourself.
You are someone who learned to adapt to an environment that was never quite built for what you actually are.
And somewhere underneath the sensible choices and the why nots and the flights home.
The wanting is still there.
It never left.
It was just waiting for you to be ready to say yes to it.
I think I’m a goddamn cheetah.
And I think it’s finally time to act like it.
— Heather
Me, too, Heather.
And I've wanted a red convertible Mustang since I was 16 years old. I'm 65. It's about time.