“No one is ever free until they tell the truth about themselves and the life into which they’ve been cast. Write it down; tell it to a friend in need, or a stranger who needs diversion. We are all here to be a witness to something, to be of some aid and direction to other people.”–Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom/1982/
The last five words are what keep echoing in my head like a ringing gong: the life “into which they’ve been cast”. As much as we like to say we can be anything we set our minds to, no matter who we are or what circumstances we come from, the truth is we do not build our lives in a vacuum. We build them within the framework of the life we were cast into by forces far beyond our control. For some people those forces were mostly benevolent. For others of us, those forces were mostly not. That has an affect on what kind of life one can build, including what one must UNbuild (and how much time and energy one must expend to do so) in order to eventually build a good and meaningful life.
When we begin to tell the truth about these things in our own lives, there will be people (particularly those who made the life into which we had been cast less than good in places) who will want and pressure us to shut up. If we bow to their pressure, we can never be free. When they are pressuring us, it may seem as though bowing to the pressure and keeping quiet is the path to greater freedom, simply because we won’t have them in our ears and faces abusing us, accusing us of ingratitude or negativity or exaggeration or outright lying in order to keep us quiet. But that isn’t freedom; that is shutting ourselves into a prison cell and handing that person the key.
If we are physically safe from them and not dependent on them for food or shelter or other life’s necessities, we can take steps to free ourselves. Instead of shutting up to appease them, what if we let them be angry? What if we stopped trying to defend ourselves to them? What if, as long as they persist in shitting on our truth, we shut them out and stop communicating with them? What if we boldly told the truth about ourselves and the life into which we’ve been cast?
It is only once we are walking in freedom, telling the truth, that we will be able to build meaningful lives for ourselves. It is only once we are walking in freedom, telling the truth, that we will be able to aid others.
Now that is freedom.