It’s become a tradition for me to write a post about freedom on July Fourth because freedom is such a multifaceted and highly emotional word that I think we need to talk through every now and then. I think the word means so much to me because I never understood what it really meant.  I didn’t face any type of hardship related to basic needs and by most counts I lived a privileged life—something I am grateful for every day.  Sometimes the only way to meet our basic needs is to fall in line with expectations of others.  Sometimes we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves too and we trap ourselves in a never ending loop of people pleasing or self-loathing or both.  I started to consider the other aspects of freedom: how much of this do we dive into on our own—like if train myself to focus on all the distraction and fun available, then I don’t have to focus on why I feel bad, what I’m really concerned about, what is really important.  In essence, I become a willing prisoner of my own mind.  And I fully acknowledge how easy it is to get distracted by everything today.  Right now as I type this I’m listening in on a meeting, I’m texting two people and I’m trying to keep my thoughts straight and steal snips/quotes for future pieces.  I do that to myself.  I can stop it at any time. 

Freedom is of course a physical thing, but what we need to talk about is mental freedom.  The way we stick to our own stories, the way we glorify feelings, putting responsibility onto others.  No, no one likes to do anything wrong, no one likes to make mistakes.  But we trap ourselves in the repetitive cycle of thoughts that force us to rehash every negative incident we ever did and then, just for extra funsies, we make that negative moment somehow mean we ARE a horrible person.  A mistake is a moment and something to learn from.  It isn’t a brand we are meant to wear forever.  We hurt ourselves thinking we are somehow absolving some sort of scarlet letter when all we are doing is embedding the mistake further and further into our neural pathways.  There comes a point where we have to take accountability and watch the trajectory of our thoughts.  I have never hidden that I needed help in this regard both professionally and chemically (medicine) and I often spoke of how hard it was on that journey to find both kinds of help along with a support system that worked for me.  But without taking the time to question my thoughts, I never would have tried to put a stop to them.  I don’t pretend that everyone is able to do that, I don’t pretend that every problem ranks the same in everyone’s life.  The result is the same, however, in how we decide to manage it: we move forward or we let ourselves drown.

Truth be told I am still scared of the depths of what I find in my brain.  I lived on repeat for a long time, trying to find different ways to look at the same story over and over again.  It helped for a while because it taught me to be a little more analytical and see the situation from all sides.  It made me understand my involvement in these situations and gave me a firm grasp of what I could and couldn’t control.  What I realized, however, is that there came a point where I would still get stuck on what I could have done differently, the things I couldn’t control.  And what good did that do?  There was no changing the past and it took a long time to stop using it as an excuse.  It gave me an explanation and that is what I had to do with it—I had to learn from it to move forward.  So.  Today is about many types of freedom. Freedom to buy the shoes we want, freedom to go for that walk, freedom to change the job, and our hair, and even what we believe in.  We get to decide what we learn more about and what that means for our futures—individually and collectively.  We need to stop telling the same story over and over again, especially for the parts we can’t change.  Allow ourselves the gift of being free in our minds as well.  Free to find a new path, to turn a new page, and to live how we are meant to be.            vvvv