What Do We Do with Freedom?
we spend time seeking freedom and liberation, but don't always know what to do and how to feel when we find it.
I was sitting and chatting with my friend earlier about freedom and liberation from our confinments. While I understand that we are bound to current systems of oppression and harm, due to living and being an active member of society, I’ve found lots of freedom and liberation in my life.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve navigated some really tough situations, especially in the last year, and through those hardships I’ve found myself in a space of autonomy, freedom, and liberation with my time and labor. We are conditioned to follow the blueprint of ‘what is’. Go to college. Get married. Have children. Get a 9-5 career and stay there until retirement. Buy a house. We’ve been socialized into all of these ways of being and we create a roadmap for our lives that follow that blueprint. Even when we are acutely aware the roadmap we’ve created isn’t neccessarily in alignment with what we want for our lives or for ourselves, we stay the course towards the confinement of societal expectations. We allow ourselves to find fleeting happiness, because the confinement is comfortable to us. But what happens when you divest from it all? When you find liberation from the weight of expectations?
Here’s the thing no one tells you: there’s survivor’s remorse in finding true freedom and liberation in life. As I’ve moved away from the nonprofit industrial complex and reimagined my relationship to work and labor, my awareness of how expectations of productivity in late stage capitalism has impacted those in my community has become exponentially clear. The exploitation of people’s brilliance and the monopolization of our time for the sake of productivity to fuel systems that continue to disregulate our bodies and divorce us from ourselves, our communities, and the Earth - well, it’s killing us.
I look at the fatigue and weariness of those around me and I want to save them from it. I want all of us to be liberated from it.
I curate my days to never be more ‘work’ than ‘living’ time. I spend a large portion of many of my days reading, writing, creating, lounging in nature, playing, and exisiting with the simple purpose of existing. My mental health has been positively impacted. My marriage has been positively impacted. My relationship with my children and extended family have been positively impacted. How I understand and love and accept myself has been impacted. My ability to accept others without (at least fewer) judgement has been impacted. And, I care very little about what people think of me, what they say about me, and what they think I should or shouldn’t be doing. I care very specifically about fully honoring my humanity and the humanity and vulnerability of those around me. That’s how I live now. I laugh loudly. I eat good food. I have good sex. I care for my community. I honor the sacred nature of being.
There are days when my life feels really good and free and I’m taken aback by how hard it is to enjoy it because I can see others shackled to the weight of societal expectations. How can I be enjoying all of this, embodying this type of life and living, have this freedom of choice, when almost everyone around me isn’t? What can I do with my newly minted freedom of my time and labor to liberate an entire community? An entire nation? A world? I will always work to dismantle structures that hold community hostage and enslave us to feeding systems that perpetuate our harm; but if others don’t join me- join us- I’ll continue to be saddled with the survivor’s guilt of my liberation, while never stopping the search for our collective liberation. My guilt is a reminder that the work is not done until we ALL get free.