don’t ask for freedom.
Lately, I’ve been exploring the caverns of my psyche, unintentionally in the conscious sense, but undeniably led by the undercurrent of my soul. There were questions lodged in my spirit that no spreadsheet, no sermon, no well-meaning friend could resolve. So the questions did what questions do: they carved rivers through my inner landscape until I agreed to follow the water downstream.
And I finally found why I ached. I kept dragging soul-sized inquiries to places, and to people, incapable of answering them. Nobody outside of me holds that authority. Growing up in a household that loved God and also wrestled with Him, I witnessed faithfulness and failure dancing on the same kitchen tile. I saw persistence rubbing shoulders with survival, success flirting with betrayal, bliss sitting next to abandonment at the dinner table. Those contradictions burrowed into me; they became the first language of my subconscious.
Even the shining trophies—money, promotions, degrees—failed to light a path inside my family that stirred me. Oddly, that absence felt like oxygen. Overwhelming, yes, but liberating, too: if no precedent exists, then I’m tasked with inventing one. My journey can be a prototype never before witnessed in our bloodline.
I had been taught to spell luxury with dollar signs and logos, and sometimes with the fantasy of escaping my lineage altogether. Yet the secret longings in my subconscious kept leaking through tiny cracks: in the way I rearranged my journal margins, in the way my body sighed whenever I passed a quiet garden. There was a richer kind of opulence speaking in whispers, one my upbringing had no vocabulary for.
Religion offered me freedom, but only to a point. It gave me hymns for my grief yet withheld the practical, earthly rituals my body needed. The ideology told me who God was, but rarely explained how to hold God’s hand while signing a lease, paying a bill, or healing a mother's wound. I needed rhythm, not just rhetoric.
So hear me when I say:
You don’t have to beg for freedom.
You don’t have to wait for freedom.
You don’t even have to ask for freedom.
Freedom is already etched into your DNA. It is your birthright, sealed before your first heartbeat. Choosing it in a world engineered to press eucalyptus oil over our chests and call it self-care is radical work. Choosing sovereignty, choosing you, will look outrageous to a culture high on burnout and applause.
Freedom isn’t found in the latest release or the next algorithmic trend; it arrives when you honor what your soul craves: slowness, intentionality, room to breathe. It isn’t found in waiting for someone to save you, because there is a certain level of freedom that you can only give yourself. No one else can do that for you. You must liberate yourself. While capitalism and patriarchy sprint, you stroll in authentic freedom. They rush you into hustle, drain you into compliance, starve you into numbness, then sell you “wellness” in travel-size bottles. Liberation asks you to step out of their queue and let your lungs fully inflate.
So no, you do not need the newest, the shinier, the “better.” What you need is a ritual that reminds your cells they are sacred. You need enough silence to hear the water moving through unseen caverns. You need the courage to move at the pace of breath rather than at the pace of profit.
Before you hand in your two-week notice to the rat race, or even if you must stay in its lobby awhile longer, you are still free. Freedom is a posture, a knowing, a choice to inhabit your skin unapologetically. Stand up from whatever table convinces you you’re too much or not enough. Walk forward. The door was never locked.
Because the truth is simple and sovereign: freedom was never a reward to earn; it was the landscape you were born to embody.
the title is inspired by the song below. i hope it’s medicine for your soul.
