i thought that i was free

I thought that I was free.

But I am not. And I never was.

It's kind of like an illusion ... I needed to believe it, to believe that I was choosing my own life ... and I don't criticize that ... it's just that now I am beginning to understand and ... accept ... that there were reasons for what has happened and where I am and the course my life took and those were predetermined by circumstance and things that I and mine thought were necessary and 'real' ... like expectation and other contraints like money and nationality ... meant that when I was moving around it was never free from the boundaries those things set up ... because even the act of trying to move away from those walls meant that they have and do exercise their wall-ness ... trying to move around or outisde them in a way, makes them concrete ... and maybe now I am starting to see that FREE is really just in me ... and I think that's what is a bit scary because implicit in accepting that is that, to some degree, all the other walls, transparent or not, are OK - that we can try to escape them or destory them or shift them but that's not really the point ... and for the better part of my life, it's all been about those walls ... so yeah, I needed the barriers, they gave me some kind of reason ... something external from me ... so that fighting inside against these external stuff gave me the feeling of having strength ... and while that may be true to a degree, I think its more true to say that a lot of that struggling has been grinding more than anything else for me - and for my family, it's just been expensive - don't get me wrong, I am completely appreciative of my privilege, because most of that came at a high bloody cost and a lot of hard work and even harder decisions on the part of my family ... not a thing came for free ... it did not come easy for me or mine to get educated and to go travelling and to make dreams happen ... just to be able to move down or up and out and back and sideways when you come from the circumstances from which the people I love have come, it's a massive fucking achievment - but for myself, for my adult life, I was doing it really in aid of something that means so much less to me now than it did before ... I was working hard for a kind of FREEDOM from lots of things, from those walls ... and that's still important but it's not crucial ... it should have been a part of the evolution, not the resolution ... and now I think I am moving to the next phase, because finding the freedom in me is what I am trying to do ... to choose ... release some of those old demons that I needed to hold onto like disappointment, like self-doubt, like self-loathing, like fear, like desire ... all those things that made me feel I had a right to escape all those external limits that existed before I did ... I am just locating that calm center now, so that every decision, every motivation, now comes from a conscious place within rather than a reaction to things with-out