When I was a little girl, freedom meant for me a day full of play. Play until collapsing, like the time that my parents found me sleeping face down, on the floor, in the middle of the room.

Little older and freedom gained a time frame: it connected to the school end in June and had duration till September. It smelled like sea and ice cream and marked by the joy of the carefree days with no responsibilities.

High school and freedom became synonym of “I’m going out”. Synonym of few hours without parents supervision, full of profound discussions and adolescent experimentations.

University student and freedom became flexible: Free to fill up the day with anything I want, to replace university class with dance lessons with my buddies, to go out and return “half past late” as my sister used to say, even to hit jack pot in the exams.. when I didn’t pass a single class. It also started to have a vision, which at the beginning had the form of my own house.

Somewhere there though, going out of the protective family cocoon and realizing step by step all the prerequisites of the “good life” (home, job, partner, travelling..), I started to feel  some restrictions to my freedom. As the good child, I assumed right to avoid big dramas and to suppress my emotions when they had negative sign. In order not to make people sad, not to ruin the (superficial) calm, not to be forced to express that I am different, based on rationalization and socially accepted musts, I created a dragnet around me that was more and more constricting me.

I had to attend my mother’s funeral with barely having a tear in my eyes to realize that I hadn’t cried for years.. Freedom got immediately a whole new dimension: It became the capability to express what I feel the moment that I feel it, without hypocrisy, without censorship, but also without targeting somebody else – a clear, sincere expression with simultaneous taking of responsibility of what is happening to me. Easy? No. Painful? Even if I thought yes initially, I realized that it was far more painful to hide and to suppress who I am. Time-consuming? Definitely. Simply because it affected my life in all levels, personal, family, relationship, profession, and the changes that my Self demanded were sweeping.

Some years later, together with my partner and impelled by our desire for internal exploration, we faced a far more greater form of freedom: the freedom of choosing direction, not for now, not for a month, but forever.  Because, if, after all, I have found how I want life to be inside me and all around me, how can I ever feel free when I continuously negotiate it? How will I be free if I let behaviors and action mechanisms that do not match with my present define my path, my relationships, my expression? And my most recent taking of consciousness: how I can feel free if my egoism always holds back, if I want 100% but I give 70%, if unspoken fears  surpass my desire for life?...

I was created to be free.

Free to live, to breathe, to enjoy, to share this wonderful universe with all its inhabitants.

It’s my duty to fulfill this!