Live Free or Die

There is a debt we pay that is not ours.

But I want to live free.

We give more to the world than we ask. And what we give is the thing is each of us that makes life ours: autonomy.

I am an adult, and yet I find the abusive mother and demanding father in all my bosses and their institutions, in the policeman anyone who would hold power over me because I am lead to believe I want something from them.

Leave wanting and you are free. Or keep wanting, but want what you can give yourself: which is everything. Everything that you are seeking out there: comfort, ease, laughs, beauty, meaning. You sell your hours and your self-respect for a small cube of space to eat your macaroni and cheese. The New Hampshirites are right, “live free or die.” But New Hampshirites, like everyone else in this world, suffer the diseases of bondage.

I fought the world long enough by fighting myself. In angry complicity joining the throngs and whipping myself forward like a horse, dangling some carrot like a morning coffee to put some gippyup in my step. All out of fear of what would happen if invoked the wrath of the one who told me I would have nothing without him and his rules.

Society exists because of the complicity of billions of people. We are given no choice, we are given a picture of the world and told “this is it.” The insidious myth of America is that we don’t do this. Because we don’t wrap up our women and hide them away, because we can choose between 150 brands of cereal, we are free.

But freedom is a decision the soul makes. It can be done by anyone at any time. It is done by people in movies and books much more often than in real life, I suspect. It requires self-reliance and the willingness to face the displeasure of others for the autonomy of your own soul.

The world will tell you that you are selfish. You are running away. You misunderstand the nature of freedom. Giving is freedom. Being a part of something bigger is freedom. These sound wise and just counter-intuitive enough to be true. I am not worried about saying the wrong thing. That worry, itself, is a tentacle of that very monster I am unwinding myself from. I am standing still in my life, this very moment, and redirecting my thoughts from their normal train of worry and speculation to a reckoning that THIS ISN’T LIFE. And those who would tell me that it is and the parts of my that echo them and betray me are the same functions in the world that exist to keep society running.

But I believe the truth is this: the dignity of each human life will not lead to anarchy. In fact, I feel more peaceful today than I did yesterday, full of ressentiment and frustration. I have been a scared child too long, asking for the favor of everyone I meet, afraid to look even my peers in the eye. But believing this WAS the world and I should get used to it.

Whatever would have scared me before, I must let go now. There are many worlds that live in me. I have given credence only to the ones I find the most base and therefore the create this monolith because they can’t imagine better. They will not notice that I’ve slipped away unless I come to them and want something from them. And if someone from in there reaches out to take something from me, they will find that I am miles away, ungraspable, with the illusion of nearness. What the world wants from me, I don’t know. I am beginning to think that people only function together to find out the answer to this question, as if the throng of bodies could produce one ringing voice, and that ringing voice could set you straight.

I don’t remember feeling really good about myself since I was too young for it to count.

It’s never enough. No matter what, it’s never going to be enough to achieve and make them all happy and be perky and presentable and smart and sophisticated and order the right wine and speak French well and reveal just the right amount and read the right books and speak about the world in the right way and share angst like a joke and kiss the right ass and pretend I don’t see what I see and pretend I do see what I don’t. It isn’t worth what I buy with this money I sell myself for. Sushi dinners and a false sense of security.

God, I love the world and the world drowns itself in me. The lights of the city dim. I have only one heart. It is dinner than the milky way. It outshines all the stars in the night. I have only one heart and it is beauty and warmth and I have missed out on my own heart for so long.

They say that with freedom comes responsibility. I say that with freedom comes freedom. If it is a high road, if it is a low road, at least it is my road.