I Will Speak Until I’m Free
Because my voice matters
I was born very, very close to the bicentennial. So close that my birthday invariably involves fireworks of some kind. So close that I usually end up getting a three day holiday weekend to celebrate it.
My mom always joked that she tried to talk her body into giving birth on the 4th so that I could have a literal holiday for a birthday. But clearly, I did not want to share my special day.
Because of my due date, the first name my mom picked out for me was Liberty. I was her first baby, so she was still in that phase of early motherhood where she thought stuff like that was cute. She changed her mind midway through the pregnancy though, because she didn’t want anyone to call me Libby. She liked the dignity and weight of Liberty and wasn’t keen on the idea of anyone chopping it up and repackaging it.
So she and my dad chose the name that’s on my birth certificate, which is actually vaguely patriotic in its own way. It worked out just fine, in the end, as I prefer my name to Liberty.
But because of this story, I’ve always had a fondness for the word and its meaning. And perhaps because of the day of my birth, I’ve also always had a fondness for revolutions — particularly the American Revolution. (Go ahead, ask me the date of the Boston Tea Party. Or the…
