Freedom All Along

We’re driving on the left side of the road in Malta, the sun is just about to set. The road runs through a valley in the middle of hills topped with yellow daisies. Light is reaching through the clouds. Allie is sitting next to me in the back seat of the rented white honda, she calls that light “angel fingers” reaching out to us. A line catches me in the song we’re listening to, “freedom is another word for nothing left to lose.” 

Every online personality test that I’ve ever taken, tells me through the results of calculations that are supposed to tell me who I am… that freedom is my top value. 

I used to imagine that when I made my own money, I would have freedom. Now I think, when I graduate college, I will have freedom. When I pop the bubble I’m in, then I will have freedom. Freedom has always been something that I needed to earn, a treasure at the top of a mountain that I will spend my whole life climbing to. When we were in Malta, on that daisy-lined road I heard Janis Joplin’s raspy voice sing those words, “freedom is another word for nothing left to lose,” and the idea of what I value the most in my life, my freedom… shifted completely. 

Windows down, wind whipping my hair across my face, the last rays of sunlight illuminating only sections of the landscape, I thought of a specific time when I felt completely free. I was newly eighteen in the spring spun to summer. I had no grounding and no longer had a standard to hold myself to. I tried to prove myself and it just did not work. My painful freedom, but freedom nonetheless, was derived from failure. 

My whole life up to that point, I prided myself on my brain. If a boy didn’t like me, I would prove to myself I was worthy by getting good grades. If I didn’t get a leading role in dance, I would justify my value by squeezing a praising remark out of a school teacher… My success in school was a net that caught me when I was hit with rejection. In the spring of 2020, I was rejected from almost every college I applied to. The one thing that was a constant way for me to feel like I had worth, melted and faded and was gone… I was so angry and so disappointed in myself that all of a sudden I was free. As counterintuitive as it seems, when I was the least confident I have ever been, when I was filled with more doubt than I ever have, I was the freest because I believed that I had absolutely nothing else to lose. 

My friend is in Rome visiting me and he is going through a similar round of discouraging fortune. I get in my bones, how he feels. I want him, so badly, to understand that at this point, he is not caged but so incredibly free. Still, no one doubts that he will be successful, not even himself. His current journey is reminding me that resilience is the highest indicator of success. What we call our “rock bottom” can be a spring for us to push off of. 

Maybe the idea of freedom is warped in our minds. We think that freedom is stability and happiness, but is it? Maybe freedom is confusion and rejection and failure, which is youth, which is now, which is nothing but the wide open, questioning road ahead. Maybe all the bad stuff that makes us think we can’t until we can, maybe that’s been freedom all along.