When Do I Feel Free?
When Travis asked me to express my thoughts on the word “liberty” my initial response was, “Holy sh*t, that’s a whopper.”
When I think of liberty, the first word that comes to mind is freedom. The second word that comes to mind is peace. And the third word that comes to mind is bravery. To have liberty is to be free. To have liberty is to live in peace. But to have liberty, in a place that does not make liberty easily accessible or achievable, you have to be brave. You have to be incredibly brave to live in a society that sees you as a threat before you’ve even opened your mouth to speak, or raised your hand in aggression. You have to be brave to achieve liberty in a society that works against your right to have liberty. You have to be resilient, and patient. You have to work towards it persistently. Liberty for me in America is not something given, it is not something earned; it is something you have to take.
I am a thirty-something black woman from Jonesboro, Georgia. Liberty is something I have to actively seek out daily, maybe even hourly. And it is a feeling that I rarely achieve consistently. For the purpose of this piece, I’m going to focus on what the word liberty means to me and only me. I’ll start by asking myself this question: “When do I feel free?”
When I was a kid, about elementary school age, I felt very free. Beyond the usual constraints of daily rules that my parents, teachers, and other authority figures placed on me; I felt very free. All of the time. I didn’t think about problems or issues. I did what I was told, or didn’t (and suffered the consequences); but I never felt this societal weight or pressure that I feel every day as an adult. Could it be a childlike freedom? Sure. But I think there’s more to it. As a black woman living in America I have a lot to contend with. I overthink quite a bit, it’s my nature, but I find myself overthinking quite a bit about my tone, my clothes, my hair, my body, my talent, my grammar, my professionalism (the list goes on), simply because I am Black. I wonder whether white women feel the pressures that I do? I’m sure there are many cases where the pressures we feel are aligned, but there are many others where we miss each other entirely.
Liberty would consistently exist in my world if the following were true: Racism didn’t exist. Sexism didn’t exist. Christianity didn’t exist. But they do. So here I am. And because I am where I am— Black and in America and female— I find that liberty is something I can have in my life, but it just doesn’t come to me freely. I have to work for it. I almost feel like I have to earn it, but that simply isn’t possible. We are born free. We shouldn’t and can’t earn that right. Perhaps working for my liberty makes me a stronger person. I like that— the idea that I’m stronger because of societal limitations. Perhaps that extra strength makes me worthy. Hmm— not quite sure about that. Everyone is worthy of freedom. In all sense of the word. Everyone has the right to be free and to feel free. So, what are we waiting for? Permission? That won’t happen. Just by being born, you have the right to be free. But within societal constraints, you may never feel free. And if you don’t feel free. You are not free.
I want to break down what liberty (or freedom) looks like to me. It looks like walking down the street wearing whatever I want to wear and not worrying about being molested or assaulted. It looks like eating whatever I want and not worrying about not looking a certain way for my job. It looks like standing up for myself in tough situations and not worrying about the consequences. It looks like expressing myself in whatever way makes me feel honest and joyful and fully myself— every single minute of every day. Honestly, it looks like a life without worry. I see joy, laughter, love, and abandonment when I visualize myself in a state of liberty; a state of freedom. Just in writing this I feel compelled to do something reckless just so that I can prove that I actually am free. But I won’t, because I’m really not free. Because I have thirty-something years of society, parents, teachers, preachers, boyfriends, girlfriends, siblings, mentors, employers, and co-workers telling me who and what I should be. And that history of anti-liberty is a lot to contend with. So instead, I’ll just continue on, trying to muster up the courage each day to get a little closer to feeling free. I guess it really is a feeling after all.
I’ll finish by asking you the same question I asked myself at the beginning of this post: “When do you feel free?”
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[Photo: originally color, @jakobowens1]
