What does freedom look like?

I’m not sure any of us knows what true freedom is. A friend said to me recently that we experience our first personal violation when schooling begins & I felt that ring true in my bones.

More of us question the systems that have nurtured & dismantled us in equal measure & we’re trying to carve new ways of living out of the rockface of capitalism.

Freedom is the freedom to be a total shit, & this is where people’s understanding of anarchy usually ends. But the truth is that capitalism allows infinitely more people to behave terribly while hiding behind sham rules or processes or government doublespeak. Whereas anarchy demands nothing less that your Whole Self engaging at all times with the world, making decisions that benefit the Self, & by extension your community (whatever they may look like).

Freedom is responsibility. It means not simply accepting. It means not following the paths laid out by others without question. If I can’t understand why I’m expected to do something, chances are I just won’t do it until I do understand. Does this make me slow & difficult? I hope so! I hope it makes me very difficult to mould into any shape except that which my heart knows to be true.

Issues arise when the expectation is that, as a woman, I’ll shapeshift to suit the general consensus, & this expectation weighs heavier, & is more destructive to the soul, the further a person is from the ‘benchmark’ of white, cis, male.

I used to think that there’d be One Solution to climate destruction, but we now know it’s a multifaceted behemoth that cannot be stopped overnight anymore than we could turn the tides. I believe the answer is multiple sovereign individuals thinking for ourselves, disconnecting as best we can, supporting each other to the best of our ability; making our very existence awkward for the system to process, like grit in the wheels; or we are the most persistent weeds thriving in the margins.

I’m writing about this in the new novels, the first, The Madness of Sara Mansfield, is available as an ebook from my webshop (link in bio). You can’t buy it online elsewhere because I wanted to continue working in the margins, away from Amazon et al.