The freedom was always yours to take

Squashed as a child. Rebelling ever since. And still not free.

Because rebelling is just the other end of the same rope.

Freedom has been a struggle for me my whole life. I grew up with close to no autonomy — squashed, controlled, told what to do and think and be, with a why? treated as an act of war. And I spent my entire childhood pushing against it. Rebelling against the school, the rules, the religion, the role I was supposed to play. Rebelling was who I was.

Here’s what took me until my forties to see. I was still doing it. Not against my parents any more — against everyone and everything. Still feeling squashed, still feeling trapped, still feeling that my freedom had been taken from me — and still rebelling, like an angry child, against whoever seemed to be doing the taking. My partner. My clients. The town I lived in. The routine. The country.

And I was no freer. Because the rebel isn’t free. The rebel is defined by the thing he’s pushing against. Take away the wall and he doesn’t know where to stand.

That’s the trap, and it’s a deep one. If you were squashed young, you have two positions available: squashed, or rebelling against being squashed. Both of them keep the squashing at the centre. Both of them are the child, still in the house, still fighting or still folding. Neither one is an adult, standing in a life, choosing.

The sentence that broke it for me was this: the freedom is mine to take at any time.

Not to win. Not to be granted. Not to fight for. To take. It’s already here. Nobody is standing on me now — the people who did are decades gone from that role, and the ones I’ve cast in it since were never really the wardens; they were just people, with their own stuff, that I’d made into walls so I’d have something to push against. The door’s been open. I’ve been standing in front of it arguing with a wall.

Taking it is undramatic. It’s saying no, kindly, and not treating the no as a revolution. It’s making a choice and not checking who it’s defying. It’s noticing when the old feeling arrives — trapped, squashed, they’re doing this to me — and asking: is anyone actually doing this to me? Or have I just found another wall to be angry at? Nearly always, the answer is the second.

And it’s letting go of the rebel, which is harder than it sounds, because the rebel was the strongest thing about me for a long time. He got me out of some rooms I needed to leave. But he can’t build anything, because building isn’t pushing. He has to hand over to someone who can just — go through the door.

If you’ve spent your life pushing against things and wondering why you don’t feel free, you’re not trapped. You’re rebelling, and the rebellion is the last thing holding the old squashing in place. It’s not your fault. It was the only way a squashed child could keep a self. But you’re not that child now, and the door was never locked.

That’s some of the quietest, deepest work inside The Way Home — putting down the fight, and finding out who you are when there’s no wall to push against. Weekly live guided journeys, a library of practices, short lessons, and a small community of people learning to just go through the door. £27 a month, cancel any month in two clicks.

— Adam