Freedom

Every path toward freedom always led me back to the same place.

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I thought I wanted to be free more than anything else.

I imagined myself a suburban Rapunzel, brown-haired and blue-eyed, pale from laying in front of my laptop at 5 in the morning, dressed in old sweats instead of a gown. I read Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson in my seclusion and dreamed of a life of freedom without attachment. I’d be the kind of writer without a permanent home, without a true love, who flitted from home to home, through unfamiliar countries, through pastoral landscapes. I’d drink wine with strangers and leave before dinner, never staying long enough to be more than a vague impression.

I’d leave before they remembered my face, escape through the shade of trees, through dark paths they couldn’t follow. Because I was free.

I wanted to be the kind of person who could only be known through her writing. And not even then - for I would filter all my perception through that of fiction, of fragmented moonlight dreams, of characters both more repulsive and angelic than I. I would construct a mask of fiction and present it to the world while I fell backward into anonymity, into the comfortable shade of freedom.

I would not require anything of anyone, and thus, I would not be required.

When I moved to Austin, Texas, at twenty years old, I soon met other people who wanted to be free, too: burners and degenerates, drug addicts, artists, college drop-outs, freelance engineers. We lived in houses owned by slum lords and warehouses and in dingy apartments above coffee shops. I should’ve been horrified by the filth and the casual way people pointed guns at each other, the decay, the poverty, the drugs, the rotten teeth. In a place I lived called The Dead End, an artist thought it’d be a good idea to glue jagged pieces of broken mirror to the wall, and drunk and high people were always stumbling around, bleeding profusely, because they’d reached out to steady themselves. I never saw anyone cleaning or doing the dishes, and the ground was caked in such filth that everyone was constantly getting sick. I didn’t have a bed so I laid on a mattress I made out of sleeping bags and blankets, and when it got cold, I had to wear a coat to bed because there was no heating.

Yet I was exhilarated. I can’t look back on those memories with horror, only fondness. It was the first time my life actually felt like it was my own, not something manufactured for me. A sudden, sordid calm fell over me.

I couldn’t be controlled anymore. Not with money. Not with love. Not with threats of abandonment. Not with the strangled cords of guilt. Take away my car. My iPhone. My college fund. Do it, then. It became laughable that anyone would think those things mattered to me more than my freedom. If someone offered me a palace to live in, a golden chain for my throat, I knew I had the power to refuse. Not just to refuse but to spit in their face and laugh. I was no longer the suburban Rapunzel, owned with comforts and the fear of the unfamiliar. I was demon-eager, vicious, free. I was ready to kill and be killed by adventure.

I wanted to climb into the swirling vortex of chaos and let it consume me. I didn’t want to be tied down by anything, anyone. I even stopped drinking coffee at the time because I didn’t want to become dependent on a substance; anything I’d have to come back to with regularity was anathema. What if I needed to pack my bags in the middle of the night, disappear through a crack in the wall like a gibbering rodent, eyes flush with predators, into a world unknown? Would there be coffee in the forest, on the surface of an alien landscape, underneath the dry sands lit burning cold by the night? I couldn’t say. Better not to risk it.

It all seemed so romantic. At first.

At the time, my favorite book was A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. It represented the truth I sought. I would read it over and over again and linger on this quote:

“The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”

Yes, only in the dark world could things change; could they reveal splendor. I lived by that philosophy. Everywhere I went, I sought out the little slices of penumbra behind glowing lights. I wanted the seedy and the forgotten, the edges of acceptability, the basement steps, the black mold in the ceiling.

Yet after the exhilarating thrill of casting everything off was gone, I found myself aching and depressed, miserable to the point of suicide. I'd put my fist in my mouth and try to swallow it. I'd drink until I blacked out. I'd sob while writing bad poetry. Freedom never quite hit the same after the first taste. I always thought the solution was to escape. And so I did, again and again, until I found myself back in the same place.

Where were these “little wondrous things” in the dark? I kept searching for them. I imagined they glittered beyond the fence posts, gates like prison bars, in a space I only had to climb over, wriggle through, to reach. No matter how much I looked, I never found those little wondrous things. I only saw a black oculus prying open to reveal a mirror of my haunted reflection.

The more people searched for freedom, the more they never quite seemed to find it. Those people I knew at the Dead End? Many of them are dead. Some of them are schizophrenic and homeless. Others sank into a deeper drug spiral. They broke up. Disbanded. Moved states—lost children. No secret paradise was waiting at the end of abdication, no greater revelation, smiling and bouncing like a baby angel of joy. You’ve made it! There was just despair. The more freedom you had, it seemed, the worse you became every year.

Philip K. Dick, in the forward to A Scanner Darkly, had quite a different view of his own book than I did:

“This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief… For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.”

Maybe what I thought was freedom wasn’t actually freedom at all.

It felt good only in those moments I thought I’d escaped from myself. I was a little goblin who’d managed to crawl a little bit out of her cage, only to be snatched back and dragged in by my own clawed hand. I felt oppressed by this revelation - I didn’t think I’d be happy in suburbia with a husband and kids, with family dinners and holiday rituals, warm tea and nice lighting and responsibilities. But I wasn’t satisfied with the alternative either, with the starvation that came from constantly seeking the nothing.

I felt trapped. The nuclear family just seemed to be a little rat nest of unhappiness, a warm place to die that people called home, and this was reinforced in almost every major piece of literature or cinema I’d ever seen. I thought becoming a wife meant I would have to give up control. I would have to destroy a crucial piece of my soul that breathed like its own entity. Once in tears, I told my ex, “Don’t hang me up in your closet like an old coat.” He was bewildered by the sentiment.

I didn’t know how to explain. I was terrified of the slavery I imagined, the fate of being forgotten, that always seemed to come with the cudgel of love.

And having a job, a career, being a “girl boss”? That was just another way to trap yourself, to chain yourself to a man or woman or corporation, a faceless entity whose cruelty wasn’t even punctuated with intermittent love. Whenever I worked a job, I longed to escape, to live on the edge of poverty again, to flit from coffee shop to coffee shop, lounging in cool sunlight, drinking bubble tea and chai lattes, and doing nothing but work on my novel.

But I’d done that before. Hadn’t I? I’d seen where that kind of lifestyle led, despite its picturesque place in my head, hung prominently in the golden and shimmering frame of a dream.

It led me back to staring at my own face behind the bars.

Maybe what I thought was freedom wasn’t freedom at all.

Maybe I mistook the abdication of responsibility for freedom—a good feeling for an irrefutable truth.

There was something I was right about, though: Freedom is worth everything. Being in control of your own will is worth more than money or love. It’s worth more than your miserable life. The knowledge of that freedom is the essence of our will, the force that builds civilizations. It is that will that built rocketships and computers. It is the mother who protects her child even as her lungs fill with blood so that our future has a chance. It is the father who faces the darkness beyond his warm home, full of wine and soft bread, even though he knows he may never return. It is the child itself who reaches for its milk, who lifts its head for the first time, moving toward its actuality despite its fragility. It is the flower in the gun. It is the aim and the bullet.

People can cage you, they can threaten you, they can kill you. They can force you to endure all kinds of humiliations, bend your arms back and rape you, brainwash you, brain damage you, cut off your fingers, but they can never grab your tongue and pull out your will. They cannot force you to make a decision independent of your own will.

Once you realize that you will be stronger than ever. You'll realize there is a pain that is worse than pain, and that is when a person tries to suffocate their own autonomy, when they throw up their hands and decide to become slaves because they refuse to acknowledge the divine spark inside, the fire that ignites the engine of their actions.

Freedom is not escape.

Freedom is not gorging yourself on pleasure.

Freedom is not demanding other people to create paradise for you, or you stubbornly decide that you must live in hell.

Freedom is not abstaining from love and children and work and responsibility and ownership because you mistook the consequences of your own choices as imprisonment.

Freedom is not given to you by bureaucrats and politicians, your mother and your father, your spouse, or your boss. It is not legislated or mandated. It is not something that requires permission.

Freedom is a choice. It’s the understanding that you have a choice and always have. You can live in suburbia with a spouse and child. Or you can have a bohemian lifestyle in a studio apartment surrounded by wine bottles and jagged mirrors glued to the wall. When you understand you have freedom, you’ll realize that your choices don’t matter as much as you understand that you are the one who made them.

Freedom means realizing you can never be imprisoned. The door is always right there.