How to Explain Yourself to Wolves
Jayme Volstad
How to Explain Yourself to Wolves
A Manuscript Concerning the Maps We Inherit and the Terrain of Leaving
How to Explain Yourself to Wolves is a work of literary inquiry and emotional cartography. It investigates the exhausting, inherited habit of over-explaining one’s existence to people, systems, and emotional climates that were never calibrated to understand in good faith.
Through a sequence of interconnected territories—from the bureaucratic fog of The Valley of Please Understand Me to the nocturnal disguises of The Carnival of Borrowed Rooms—the manuscript tracks the transition from accommodating the weather of others to surveying one’s own sovereign ground.
Selected Folio Passages
Unpublished Proofs“I spent twenty years believing that if I only found the right combination of adjectives, the wolves would stop circling the porch and come inside to sit politely by the fire.”
“It took twenty years to learn that an audience that feeds on your distress is not confused by your grammar. They understand you with absolute precision. That is why they keep asking for another draft.”
“A boundary is not a barbed wire fence constructed to punish the intruder. It is a simple survey line drawn on clean parchment, stating: Here is where your weather stops, and here is where my ground begins.”
Core Inquiries
How we navigate our lives using maps drawn by people who survived a different catastrophe and insisted their landmarks were universal.
The learned compulsion to track and prepare for storm systems occurring entirely within another person's temperament.
Why walking away does not require winning an argument, obtaining permission, or drafting a final closing statement.
The shift from experiencing the world as a captive subject to naming the terrain as an author of your own boundaries.