“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you somethig else is the greatest accomplishment.”
Today, I punched the clock at the food pantry for the last time. I enjoyed working there, but I felt it was time for me to leave. I have some rationalizations that I’ve given people who have asked, but I think the truth is something deeper and more emotional. Something that builds in me over time whenever I start working for a wage somewhere.
At the pantry, I had structure, and there was safety in punching that timeclock: the hours were laid out, the expectations clear, the weekly rhythm steady as a drum. The work matters, too—it serves a need. I helped fill hungry stomachs and helped families pay the bills. The staff, volunteers and I worked together to make a difference in visible, tangible ways. And all of those good things will continue without me.
But over time, I began to feel the other side of the security the timeclock offered. The very stability that protected me also enclosed me. My days became smaller, predictable, and in their predictability, a suffocating comfort.
Now, as a freelance reporter, the frame has fallen away. I wake up and the day is mine to shape—or to waste. The hours are unmarked until I mark them. But the view is wider here, the horizon unobstructed.
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Working at the pantry was like traveling in a car. Comfortable and easy, but the road always follows the lowest path. Now I’m out of the car, free to hike to the hilltops. The ground is uneven but the views are so much more panoramic. I can smell the fresh air. And I’m more vulnerable, too.
This is what freedom really is—not some endless expanse of possibility without weight or cost, but the strange mix of risk and responsibility that comes from choosing your own way. Philosophers and poets have always circled this truth: that liberty and danger are bound together, that you cannot have one without the other. To live freely is not to avoid risk, but to embrace it as the very shape of life. Freedom is not a grassy valley, but a cliff edge. Walking it not comforting, but exhilarating.
““I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.””
For me, that decision came in leaving behind the safety of a paycheck to take up the pen full-time. I won’t pretend it was an easy decision, but it wasn’t a leap made in a blaze of courage, either. It was the result of a slow accumulation of restlessness. I wanted to breathe more deeply, to chase the thrill of uncovering stories again, to let my life hang by the tender thread of my own words.
It is reckless, maybe. Certainly precarious. There are nights I struggle to sleep: What if this doesn’t work? What if the ground does give way beneath me, and I tumble to the metaphorical rocks below? But there are mornings when the fear feels instead like exhilaration, the way standing on the edge of a great height can make your pulse race with fear and wonder at once.
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.””
And while I have every intention of reaching heights, I also recognize in my heart that I may not achieve that. We’re all only promised one thing at the end of this life, one destination where we all meet, no matter what path we walk until then. Which makes walking a path worthy of ourselves all the more essential to being human. We may fear the end of life, but if I reach it without risking anything, without at least trying to reach my full potential, without gambling on myself, then I fear the regret I will feel will far outweigh the fear, and will be irredeemable.
This mixture of fear and pressure, safety and possibility—is the essence of freedom. The fear pushes some people stay in safety, and the pressure pushes others into the unknown. I have constantly wrestled with this duality of living. I don’t think I’ve always made the best choice. I’ve certainly not always made the safe choice. We are all, in some way, balancing the same equation: security against liberty, comfort against possibility, the known against the open-ended. Some lean one way, some the other. Neither is wrong. But to me, right now, the risk feels worth it. I would rather stumble on the bright path to a great height I may never reach than walk surely on a path through the shadowy valley.
