Freedom

I am sure there are many people who have experienced this besides me. The autumn of 2010 I moved away from home, away from my parents, to live on my own. When I slowly but surely realised that no one decided over me any more except myself, I started doing small things that defied what my parents had taught me.

I say small things because I am either too scared or too sensible to do bigger things like drink myself senseless or stop doing schoolwork. So I do such things as wear home-knitted woolly socks to school or eat the same food for all the three meals in a day. Or go to school in smelly clothes because my friends don't really care, and that smelly jumper is the only one I really want to wear. Or, like I did more recently, go outside when it's -2 degrees centigrade and approximately two centimetres of fresh snow on the ground, with bare feet in crocs and only a T-shirt on my upper body. Small acts of defiance that makes the sensible part of you react with disgust. Small acts that reinforce the idea in your mind that you are really truly in control over your life.

It is really quite thrilling to do these things, especially the first time, and you can revel in your newly extended freedom. I think it is important to do such small silly things every now and again, to prove to ourselves that we really do have complete control. That we really are free. That our parents no longer have anything to say, and instead it's all us now. That sense of freedom is really nice. Also, breaking the norms of society is good, just to show (to myself, mostly) that I am an individual, and not some robot or cog in the machinery of society.

But now that I have discovered that freedom, I also feel a responsibility. I can now decide what or who I want to have power over my decisions. And if you think that you can just say: Well, me, of course, I think you will find that it is quite difficult to do everything based on only what you yourself think. I mean, where do your opinions and values come from? Those are the things you use to make decisions, and they are almost always based on something outside yourself. So you can choose whether you want fashion and popular culture to affect you, or some hero or idol, or religion. The important thing here is that you choose, because you can. And the only thing worse than a bad choice is not choosing at all.



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