I have gathered all my courage to pen my first entry ever to one of the reflective Biweekly questions that the Abundance Tribe positively forces one sit with. The interest was triggered by what freedom looks like to me and the reason behind the passion which sometimes spills fused with trauma.
This question -What does FREEDOM feel like to you?- is open to anyone within the Hive community so you too can give it a try.
Free At Last?
As a descendant of my enslaved ancestors, I was born into a newly found Republic. Our freedom fighters were still nursing their PTSD and alien gunshot wounds when I took my first breath.
How can a child of war know freedom?
Among the noises I picked up from my environment were my mother's screams as her husband's raging blows drummed on her delicate skin. I must've wished for her freedom, no?
Eventually, she left.
But.
Grief would later hold me captive as they lowered her body in the grave. I was fifteen and a life without my much needed guide felt too unfair. I was chained onto sadness and heartbroken. I remember angrily yelling at the wind demanding to be read my sins and shown where to repent in exchange for my paralyzing pain but...
Nothing.
I must've lost myself somewhere in the aftermath and an early marriage came out as a safe haven for a terrified grieving eighteen year old who had had it with the toxic homestead death had so cruelly turned into home. I jumped into one unaware it was a gaslighting trap.
My Libra-ness poured her naive heart out on our first nights and unknowingly helped cement the chains that held me down for a long disturbing decade as I ate dust and mud off someone's unkind boots. His fists rained on my skinny frame like a hailstorm as my freedom peeked through where my soul cracked.
Breaking free.
Freedom found me
And blanketed my unsure being.
She welcomed her to the light.
Left the throne
And fell unto her deserving feet
To serve me.
Until.
A man with more silver coins and extra gold pockets branded me a thief and coughed up his minions to lock me up. He had ranked high up the ladder in an earlier time and those who dragged me to court didn't forget to remind me he was still their boss.
Welcome to corrupt regimes legacies.
The rigged system enabled a judge to later on steal my freedom for two years and moved on to the next case like she normally did/does. Freedom felt like strength draining from my bones of their marrow at that dreadful minute.
In a striped smock, I lived among established queens of the underworld who fondly called me and anyone with unsoiled hands cowards. To them, we had no business being among them.
That entire stay taught me physical freedom doesn't necessarily equate to mental freedom. It is the jailbirds that showed me the path to inner freedom even while I missed roaming around in populated streets without a guard.
Freedom felt more like dead weight when I returned from living behind high walls and months of begging for the most basic needs. I had adjusted to operating under oppressive rules and my mind was yet to accept what it had previously craved for day and night.
Since then, I have been in captivity a few more times.
This one time, I met a soul whose light made me feel like they are the one but my scattered heart dragged me back from dreamland when their light went out. My happiness had slowly become theirs and without them darkness caged me once more for old times sake.
Or the many other times, I have found myself boxing myself within unhealthy expectations. Self sabotaging. Or understandably feeling defeated to even try to prove that I am enough.
So.
Freedom feels like inner freedom. The ability to accept who I am and whatever I have been through. It is in acceptance of our current selves that we can manifest better versions of us. Or so I believe.
wambuku w.
