The Wildberry Letters: Letter One

October 17, 2025

The Wildberry Letters: Letter One

Why I’m Writing This Now

There are certain moments in life when you can feel a chapter shifting inside your body before it ever makes sense in your mind. A quiet, undeniable knowing. A truth that doesn’t ask for permission, simply the courage to be met.

I’ve reached one of those moments.

For anyone new, I’ve already written the full story of Wildberry. How it began in late 2019, and how it became a home for strangers who needed belonging. How it grew from a tiny idea formed at a crossroads in my life after leaving teaching, and how it turned into a heartbeat of community. If you want the timeline, I wrote it here: Wildberry, a History.

But this is not the history.

This is the integration.

This is the why.

This is the part that lives beneath the story.

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For a long time, I believed Wildberry was my forever. I poured myself into it. And not just my energy, but my heart, my body, my time, my hope. It was a place built by devotion, by grit, by faith… by a woman who refused to stop believing in community, and that healing could be found in ordinary places like summer fields and wooden picnic tables.

And for a while, that version of me was enough.

But life has a way of eventually honoring truth. Even the truth we don’t want to face. Even the truth we’re afraid will disappoint people. Even the truth that asks us to loosen our grip on what once felt sacred.

Somewhere along the way, I began to disappear inside what I built.

I didn’t see it at first. That’s how slow-burning self-abandonment works, you don’t notice the cost until your body does. Until your nervous system starts whispering: this is too much. Until you’re running on survival and calling it purpose. Until the dream starts taking more than it gives.

Wildberry was beautiful. But it also became extractive. And that was never its fault, that was solely mine. You see, when you build from burnout, you create structures that require your self-sacrifice to survive.

And back then, I didn’t know how to stop sacrificing myself.

I became a light for everyone but myself. I gave and gave and gave, until the fire inside me dimmed so low I thought I had lost it forever. I thought maybe that spark was something you only get once in life. I thought I had used mine up.

I know now that isn’t true.

The truth is, healing changed everything.

Not the soft kind of healing people dress up for social media. Real healing. Nervous-system-in-the-mud healing. Shadow-facing, tear-soaked, dead-night, truth-or-nothing healing. The kind you don’t choose until your soul refuses to let you abandon it again. The kind that tears down everything you built from fear and asks you to build again, but this time from truth.

Wildberry didn’t fail. I didn’t fail. It gave me everything it came to give me. And now it is time for me to honor it fully, by telling the truth and letting it evolve.

This letter is the first step of my goodbye. A soft undoing. An intentional closing of a door… not from bitterness, but from sovereignty.

When people say “you’ve changed,” they usually mean it as a warning. I receive it as a blessing.

Because I have changed.

Because I did the work.

Because my nervous system finally knows safety.

Because my soul is louder than my fear.

Because the fire came back.

This is not an ending.

This is a becoming.

More soon.

💛Bridget