Freedom is personal.

Mansi Goel
Jul 24, 2017 · 6 min read
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” — Voltaire

One Thanksgiving during college, I brought home a few friends who didn’t live locally to the university. After dinner, we meandered through the social abyss of my suburban neighborhood and bought cigarettes at a nearby 7–11. My family didn’t know I’d begun smoking but they figured it out when I returned with a distinctive eau de cigarette.

This was a radical change in behavior for the sheltered, precocious sixteen-year-old college sophomore they had dropped off at Cal and it threw them into a tailspin. They had hoped I would continue my academic trajectory to a secure and successful future, maybe even become a doctor by twenty-five. Smoking seemed less like a casual rebellion and more like the harbinger of a dissolute, distinctly American, identity.

In a spiral of fear, they sought to establish control. They directed me to quit Cal, stay home, and attend a nearby community college under family supervision. But we discovered together that night the impact of our few years in America: I was over eighteen by then and couldn’t be commanded. Despite their frightened threats and earnest pleas, I left home and returned to Berkeley that night.

Shortly thereafter, to my family’s great dismay, I even left Cal for some time. I embarked on a spiritual adventure that continues even today and is characterized partly by the freedom I’ve enjoyed in America, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. When I asserted my autonomy from my family that night, it was as an American woman. There are other places where a young woman can go out into the world alone and test the lives she might choose, but there aren’t enough. Thirty years ago, as a little girl in India, I never heard stories of young women living independently, let alone see any examples. This has changed a bit but there are still too few places in the world for women to claim an experimental freedom, and still none as vast as America.

My sense of American freedom is framed between the constraints I internalized as an Indian girl and the possibilities I encountered in Cal’s distinct environment. Back then, the Naked Guy was making headlines and the city of Berkeley debated heatedly before banning public nudity. During my first week on campus, I saw several nude people in the streets. Their casual disruption of such a core norm thrilled and unnerved me. My own rebellions had been mostly rhetorical until then, but Berkeley proposed new and boldly embodied questions.

What are we free to do? Who are we free to be? America’s answers manifest between mercurial shifts of popular wisdom and evolving interpretations of our founding principles. The call-and-response between these has hypnotized me into aspiring toward that supreme possibility: to know myself.

I yearn for America to proclaim its freedom with full-throated vigor because it is as an American I conduct experiments to understand who I am and, more importantly, who I might become. I accepted the fictions of my own origin only to find them dismantled. So, when culture does its work of gendering, racializing, nationalizing, sexualizing, and more, I accept it partly as an invitation for deconstruction. Freedom is the platform on which unexpected possibilities can be reconstructed.

This is one reason I struggled with the “born this way” anthem of the gay rights movement. It countered people’s scorn for the “gay lifestyle” with a scientific (or divine) basis. Even if it’s valid, I lament its capitulation that choice isn’t an acceptable rationale for being gay and having equality. What is freedom if we can’t even choose our most private acts? Can only some external natural (or supernatural) order justify our liberties? What of humanity’s headlong plunge into the mystery itself, to discover and devise what we may?

Soulful experimentation has a robust lineage in America. We canonize the lyrical insights of Walt Whitman or Annie Dillard as our unique contributions to the world pantheon. Earnest tragedies like Christopher McCandless’s or Timothy Treadwell’s receive a more piquant, but no less American, memorialization in popular cinema. Either way, the spiritual possibilities of the wild frontier the pilgrims devoured retains a faded allure. I keep leaning toward it even knowing its promise doesn’t accrue to everyone.

Over the decades, I’ve blended the creative and the banal in my own life to experiment with myself. Once, it was by donning a burqa (I’m not Muslim) to go shopping; I gained insight into the unexpected power of that garment, beyond its obvious limits. Or, after hitchhiking a few times in Europe, I later surprised myself by picking up a homeless hitchhiker back in Northern California; I surprised my husband even more when I brought him home so he could shower and rest.

None of my experiments is an example of exceptionalism, nor is this a recounting of my dilettante efforts to unfold into my wholeness. It is an endorsement of the conditions that enable ordinary people to stretch into ourselves. I’ve sometimes stepped just beside myself and, at other times, attempted a long leap into someone else’s shoes. Either way, I’ve touched the world in a new way and learned more about being human.

History’s heroes may be born to relentlessly fight the limits on living fully but some of us don’t even know what limits to push against. We ordinary souls need friendlier conditions of freedom so we can look for ourselves in the margins of normalcy without finding ourselves marginalized. After all, some women donned pants a century before women ‘could’ wear pants, but ‘women’ couldn’t really wear pants until any unassuming woman could do so without concern. Not everyone can live their life to make a point.

The nude people I saw in Berkeley were older, white, and casually comfortable in their bare skin — a specific privilege I imagine for all of us. Their wherewithal in challenging a basic tenet expanded my horizon for radical examination. My experiments have been more mundane — I have yet to stride down a street in glorious full monty — but critical for expanding my range of being and for establishing my convictions.

“The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.” — Adam Gopnik

Some of us accommodate to our existence more readily than others. For my part, I just try to keep pace with my unfolding consciousness. After all, to ourselves, we’re not suddenly birthed, we simply always are, and we continually discover and forge how we are. We don’t come into being as much as we perpetually awaken into it. While awakening to myself, I’ve evolved through various identities— novitiate, tech executive, vagabond — partly by necessity, partly as a luxury. If even the gender or sexuality others told me I was didn’t fit the person I actually awaken into, the exigencies of exploration would be even greater. I well appreciate the urgency of those who inhabit themselves uneasily to find an identity they can take rest in.

To imagine an America where this intimate movement of self isn’t possible, or is possible only for a rare few, or only within such a narrow band as to obviate the effort…well, it not only dashes my heart’s dearest hope, it defies the promise of America’s hallucinogenic beacon: freedom. Despondency turns to terror for anyone whose sense of self falls outside its now shrinking beam.

Had I grown up in India, maybe I still would have smoked in college and maybe my family would still have lost their minds over it. But, to claim the same independence there, I might have needed more heroism against many obstacles. Here, I faced no corporeal risks so I could take emotional ones more freely.

American freedom isn’t just an idea, it’s a deeply personal reality. When people rhapsodize over it, what are they extolling? If it’s the freedom to obey their decisions of who we should be, then just being our ordinary selves may become heroic, after all.

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