Freedom

‘Cause as long as my eyes still see
As long as my heart still beats
As long as I’m alive, I’m free.
I got good intentions, I don’t need your blessings.
Yeah, I’m already blessed, yeah,
I’m already blessed and free.
-Kane Brown

The difference between the drowning man and one who treads water isn’t the fact of the water, but his relationship to it. 
-Alex Bromley

What does being free mean for you? Does it mean free of responsibilities and choices? Maybe your definition means being able to finally quit that dead end job and move onto something more meaningful with your life. We only get one, after all. 

The world is only so big as what you’ve seen of it. It’s why I think so many people can become unhappy by staying permanently in their hometowns. Not to say that’s an all encompassing statement, but I can only go off of what I’ve experienced. Maybe I have a wire crossed in me to never want to return to my hometown, of seeing it as a prison more than a place of fond memories growing up. This pertains to everywhere I have been, though. Through the benefits of my work, I’ve had the opportunity to move every few years or so and see a lot of the world within those times. The ironic thing, though, is that every time I move to a new area, I hit a point of exhaustion with it. I get bored or complacent and then stop wanting to put forth the effort required to truly make it “home”. Before you know it, those restaurants full of happy memories become bitter in my mind. I’ll drive around the town and see it as nothing more than a large cage keeping me contained. 

But at some point along this process you have to wonder what the common denominator is. It’s not that these places or experiences have become tinged with the sadness they have, because all places do. The common denominator is me. 

I just keep running. 

I don’t exactly know when this started. My therapist would tell me not to focus on my childhood  and instead she would give a little smile and ask me what progress I’ve made in the here and now. From what she reflected back at me, this wasn’t something that I needed to delve into my childhood traumas for and instead try and see the world for what it was. To live in the present. I wonder sometimes if the trick to untangling a knot isn’t to stare at it and puzzle on how it became tied in the first place, but to put your hands on it and feel where the give is. To work with it and try to untangle it, hoping one released thread would lead to another. If you put in all the work, who knows? Maybe you untangle it completely. Sometimes you need to be comfortable with the possibility it’s one you might carry around with you the rest of your life. 

Action will always trump inaction. The ability to get the ball rolling on your life cares very little for the amount of time you spend researching it, reading about it or talking to your friends for their opinions. “Analysis by paralysis”, in the simplest way I can remember talking about it. Every self help book I ever read and every YouTube motivational speech does very little except to waste my time, my energy and my money. One of my greatest skills is my comfort in water. Did I learn this by reading about proper strokes in a book or watching the Olympics? Ultimately no, I learned how to swim, hold my breath and dominate the water from being thrown in (thanks, Dad) and having the fortitude to do so. And the world is a scary place, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing fun about forging yourself through the fire and burning yourself in the process. 

Which is why sometimes it’s just easier to run.  

For all of my bravado about swimming and the water, I would say that I could have used a lot more chutzpah as it relates to my relationships in life. I don’t just mean relationships with women, either. My relationship with food is strenuous on its best days. My relationship with where I live is anxiety inducing after enough time. My relationship with my job can sometimes be toxic.

So I would run from them. 

I would run away from anyone attempting to love me. I would run away from my own personal values and boundaries in an attempt to appease someone and put them on a pedestal. I would run from the boredom of the city or leaving my job just because the alternative of settling down roots or taking risks seemed insurmountable. All the while, one shovel full at a time, I was digging myself further and further down into a prison of my own making. Just staring at this knot in my life as I put more and more layers on it and proclaimed out loud, “it’s just too much!”

It’s taken a lot of time to finally put that shovel down. To finally stop trying and layer more knots on top of knots. To realize that most of my problems in life are in fact, my problems and start that unwinding process. I still don’t have it all figured out. I know that certain knots are going to stay with me. I think that’s ok. I want you to know that whatever knots or chains or walls you have up for yourself, that you can begin the process of overcoming them but you have to make that progress happen. It will always be easier to go with the path of least resistance. 

To swim with the current instead of against it. To skip a workout. To eat that extra dessert. To have that extra shot of tequila. To keep that job holding you down. To buy that self help book. To watch that extra episode on Netflix. To remember a place or a memory and wallow in it. 

But the energy required to go against it is, I think, energy well spent. Because maybe after enough time, you will see those walls and chains you’ve built for what they really are.

And break them.