What Does Freedom Feel Like? Unconditional Permission to Live
By Jennifer Paros
“Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don’t set any condition.”
When I was in high school, as Friday’s classes came to an end and I stepped out of the building to get on the bus that would take me home, I almost always felt free. Friday afternoons, beginning the moment school was out, was the lightest time. All heaviness lifted off me and my mind was close to completely unburdened. I’d been to school but now I was on the other side of that story; I’d crossed the bridge and had, in my possession, two unspent days ahead, two days in the bank, to do with as I pleased.
Those Friday hours were like a bonus – once spent, I still had Saturday. And it was okay to spend Saturday because I still had Sunday. But once Sunday arrived, the feeling of freedom had dwindled almost entirely in anticipation of Monday. There’s no difference technically between Saturday’s and Sunday’s unscheduled hours, but I no longer felt free – because how we feel depends upon our focus and frame of mind.
Early on I came to equate the relief of not having to do anything with freedom, but later discovered this makes for an incomplete equation. Not having to do anything is like not having to spend what we have, which can feel like relief, but there is more freedom in investment. When we invest, we pour fuel into the plane so it can soar. This is what we’re doing when we work on things we love. But even during the final stages of a beloved project, my mind can fill with projections and judgments and those thoughts can spark worry, which feels heavy. Once the project is completed, often a “lifting” occurs and I feel freed, not because the work has ended, but because the worrisome mind activity about the work has ceased.
It is possible to give ourselves unconditional permission – clearance to learn as we go, to allow things to unfold – at any stage of any process. We don’t have to withhold approval until we can practically guarantee a desired result; we don’t have to apply that pressure to our experiences. Withholding permission to embrace life as it stands, in the moment, creates chronic resistance, which makes a jail with us as our own jailers. Allowing ourselves to act from love without external assurances is freeing. If parents demanded of their kids a complete rundown of what might happen at school each day and how they would handle every potential situation, no child would ever attend school again. Yet we sometimes ask this of ourselves, having become distracted from our innate feeling of freedom by focusing on the unknowns of life. We forget certainty is a feeling we allow ourselves to feel (or don’t), not something granted by external conditions. I give myself permission to is a galvanizing thought. It can move us to let things unfold, rather than trying so hard to control what happens next.
“Dream and give yourself permission to envision a You that you choose to be.”
When I was a little girl, I thought there was a kind of beauty that would make me free from insecurity, self-criticism, and self-consciousness. I assumed that anyone in possession of the right kind of face felt that way. My face was “okay” but it wasn’t ponying up those good feelings. But in resisting the face I had, in believing that feeling free comes from the outside in, I never gave myself the go-ahead to live from the feeling I wanted. I was awaiting the day my face might free me, and my face was awaiting the day I would simply embrace the freedom to feel beautiful. I did not believe it was okay to feel the way I wanted without the external world verifying that it was the truth. However, it is hard for the world to validate something about ourselves that we are not giving ourselves permission to feel.
Jane Marczewski, a young woman with cancer and a 2% chance of survival, recently sang on America’s Got Talent to great response. She allowed herself to live from the feeling of what she wanted. That is the feeling of freedom. It doesn’t matter what our chance of success/survival is – any chance is still a chance, once we give it to ourselves. We don’t have to wait for a Friday afternoon, a different face, a project to be done, or a healed body. We already have the freedom now to feel however we wish.
Jennifer Paros is a writer, illustrator, and author of Violet Bing and the Grand House (Viking, 2007). She lives in Seattle. Please visit her website.