You Can Never Be Completely Free Until You’re Free from Yourself

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” — Alice Walker

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“There is more than one kind of freedom. ‘Freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’.” — Aunt Lydia, The handmaid’s tale

“How does she do that?” I wondered. “Who gave her permission to play like this? To jump from image to image. To lie and then quickly admit that she was lying. How does she know how to be herself? Who taught her how to be free?”

I read Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s tale last weekend and as I read it I couldn’t stop thinking about the level of freedom with which she writes.

I can’t explain it. She’s that good. She’s so good I felt her personality(her freedom) shining through the spaces between her words.

“She is an 81-year-old woman.” I thought “She should be repressed.”

But she wasn’t. Not with her words. Not with her verbs and her adjectives. With her words, she broke rules that I didn’t know existed. With her sentences, she transported me to foreign places and taught me how to fly without wings.

I guess that’s what art does. True art comes from the space beyond our limitations. The ether in between our inner chains. There can be no art without a certain level of inner freedom. There can be no art without a certain depth of inner truth.

Who teaches artists to be themselves? Who teaches artists how to be free?

For my whole life, I’ve had but a single dream: To become free.

I Will Be Free When I Finally Get Out of This Place

I’ll create whatever I want to. Talk to whoever I want to. I’ll read everything without fear of being judged. I’ll dance without shame because I’ll finally be free.

I’ll be old enough. With enough money to take care of myself. And a bunch of new friends. People who won’t judge me. People who’ll listen to my side of the story. People who won’t threaten to beat me up whenever they felt triggered enough.

At 13 years old, these were my thoughts.