The first time I came out, someone else did it for me. My friend Craig told my parents I was gay at a party I was hosting because he was jealous of my then-boyfriend and in love with me. I was woken up the next morning by my Dad pretending to throw up in the garden outside my bedroom window.
He’s never addressed that moment. Neither have I. I had to walk into the kitchen hungover, my then-boyfriend secretly, or not so secretly, asleep in my room down the hall. My Mum was crying. My Dad was angry. And I think my fight-or-flight response took over because I remember denying the entire thing.
I’m not gay. Not true. A few days later, Mum rang me while I was at work. I told her over the phone. Then cried in the back room. It was a really shit way to come out. But that’s how it happened. I didn’t get to choose the moment. This time, I did. This time, I chose to come out as Woulf.
I’ve always had strong gut instincts. They became fucking loud after being held at gunpoint. For years, though, there was so much other noise around them that I didn’t always know what I was actually hearing. Fear. Hypervigilance. Other people’s expectations.
The version of myself I thought I needed to be. Wolfie. When I’m actually calm and letting things arrive instead of trying to control everything, something different happens. I get what I call a download. First comes a thought. A topic I need to write about. An action I need to take.
Something I suddenly know I need to do. Human Design would call it Sacral Authority. I just call it my gut. It feels like this warm mmmhmmm in my stomach. Then an inhale. A tightening in my chest. Then a release. And when I recognise it properly, I get tingles across my body like something inside me is saying: Do this now, cunt.
Usually it’s tiny stuff. Turn left instead of right. Take that with you. Write this down. Here’s your next article. And when I listen, life seems to move. When I don’t, I forget my towel at the gym or spend twenty minutes wondering where the fuck I put my headphones.
Tiny consequences. The bigger downloads are different. Because sometimes my gut says: Sell the house. Quit the job. Leave the relationship. Tell the truth. Post the story. Be seen. Those ones come with fear. Chest tightness. Ringing ears. Feeling sick. Sometimes tears. And then eventually: FUCK IT.
That’s usually the point where something changes. Not because the fear disappears. Because I walk straight through it. That’s what happened when I came out as Woulf. First to my Mum. Then to Facebook, Linkdin and Seek. Which, unfortunately, is basically the way people find shit out in my extended family.
And I remember thinking: FUCK IT. I’d already spent too much of my life trying to make myself easier for other people to understand. Wolfie did a lot of that. He filtered. Adjusted. Read the room. Tried to belong. Woulf Ryder doesn’t really operate like that.
I’m not saying I walk around without boundaries. Quite the opposite. The mask itself became part of that lesson. Because privacy and hiding are not the same thing. Hiding is believing people aren’t allowed to see the real you. Privacy is deciding exactly how they get to see you.
The mask lets me be seen on my own terms. That changed everything. Because somewhere along the way I stopped asking: Will these people accept me? And started asking: Do I actually want to belong here? Very different question. After I told everyone about Woulf, I went for a dog walk and cried.
Nothing terrible had happened. Nobody had rejected me. The world hadn’t collapsed. Nobody arrived at the house to confiscate my Woulf mask. I’d simply released all the emotion attached to the fear of being seen. And then life kept going. Actually, it got bigger.
Which has become a bit of a pattern. The more honest I become, the more things seem to open. Not always instantly. Not always how I expect. But enough that I’ve stopped dismissing it as coincidence. My process now is pretty simple: Calm the mind. Listen. Write the download down.
Feel what happens in my body. Take the action. Walk through the fear. Release whatever emotion comes with it. See what happens. Learn. Adjust. Keep moving. That’s basically my entire life strategy now. Very scientific. I’ve reinvented myself a lot. I started in fashion retail.
Then pets. Then gyms. Then I spent a decade building a furniture business. And now? Content creator. Writer. Personal brand. Resident Writer & Content Contributor for MSWI. Woulf Ryder. That’s a lot of fucking lives. But there’s an important difference this time.
Previously, whenever something collapsed, I immediately tried to rebuild another respectable version of myself. Another job. Another business. Another identity. Something I could point at and say: See? I’m doing something acceptable again. This time I didn’t.
I let the old version fall apart. And instead of immediately rebuilding Wolfie, I started paying attention to what was underneath him. That became Woulf Ryder. Not a character I invented. More like the version that was left when I stopped editing myself. At first, Woulf really was just a mask I wore to parties.
Then people started recognising him. Then I started writing. Then people started reading. Then came subscribers. Paid pups. Brand opportunities. MSWI. A podcast. Radio. A completely different direction than the one I thought I was rebuilding toward. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I realised: Woulf had become a personal brand.
Which is hilarious when you think about it. I’ve spent most of my working life selling things. Clothes. Pets. Gym memberships. Furniture. Probably thousands of other things I’ve forgotten. I spent years learning sales. Visual merchandising. Marketing. Storytelling.
Brand building. Customer psychology. And now I’m using all of it again. Except this time the thing I’m building around is me. Not the filtered me. Not Wolfie. Me. Although technically the product still has a fucking Woulf mask on it. For most of my life, I thought reinvention meant becoming someone new.
I don’t anymore. I think sometimes reinvention is just removing everything that was never really you. The job title. The house. The business. The expectations. The need to look successful. The need to look respectable. The need to be understood. The need to belong everywhere.
Strip enough of that away and eventually you meet the person underneath it. That’s what happened to me. Wolfie wasn’t fake. He got me here. He survived some shit. He built businesses. He loved people. He made mistakes. He tried incredibly fucking hard. But he also spent a lot of time reading the room.
Woulf Ryder walks into it. There’s a difference. I used to think being The Fool meant being reckless. Now I think it means being willing to move before you know exactly where the road ends. That’s the part I’m learning. I don’t need to know exactly what Woulf Ryder becomes.
I don’t need a five-year fucking roadmap. I don’t need to force every opportunity into the version of success I understood before. I can listen. Experiment. Follow what feels alive. Say yes when my gut says yes. Say no when it says no. Make something. Put it into the world.
See what answers back. And keep moving. The Fool steps off the edge because he trusts himself enough to find out what happens next. For once in my life, I think I do too. So that’s where I am. No longer rebuilding the life I lost. Building the one I actually want.
Listen for the download. Feel the gut. Step through the fear. Do the thing. Then see where the Woulf ends up. Come find me. If you dare. Arwoooooooo 🐺