Freedom When.......

Freedom looked like break time and home time - an escape from the narrow confines of the Catholic school system.

Freedom looked like hopscotch, roller skates and handstands out in the street with friends - an escape from thoughts and grown-up stresses.

Freedom looked like no spots, a fixed tooth and a body like the women in the underwear section of Littlewood’s catalogue.

Freedom looked like Thursday nights at the under-18 disco at the Top Club. Friends, boys, music, dancing, nothing else existed for those few hours.

Freedom looked like getting the partner, the job, the house, the babies.

Freedom looked like the cancer being cured and never losing a loved one.

Freedom looked like money. That would solve all my single-parent worries!

Freedom looked like the next professional qualification, the next milestone in my business, the next client to help.

Freedom looked like books, meditation, spiritual awakening and enlightenment.

I see now I was always free.

I’ll be free when. I’ll be happy then. A trick of the lie of the human experience.

Being shamed in a lesson, bored to death in my bedroom, with a face full of spots and a non-catalogue body, without a partner, in the grip of loss, struggling for money.

Through it all I was free.

Freedom is an inside job. My humanness still overlooks it at times. But freedom is there, it can never not be.

Freedom is the real me, my being is free.

Much love,

Nicola x