Freedom

Knew what it was at age 3, still chasing

Goodbye

I was three and a half. The car was packed, and we were leaving a small holiday home in the Austrian countryside. It wasn’t ours, but for a few weeks, it had felt like it could be.

There’s little I remember from that age, but I remember that moment. I sat in the back seat, watching dust rise behind us as the car pulled away. And I felt a strange kind of sadness. Not loud or overwhelming, just quiet and final. Even at that age, I somehow knew something good was ending.

At the time, I couldn’t explain why it mattered, but I understand it now. That place had been the first where I could simply exist without needing to be anything in particular. No expectations, no performance, no pressure. Just a few days of being left alone, and being completely fine with that.

It was the first time I had felt free. And it was the first place I had to leave behind.

What I miss from that memory isn’t the scenery, or the house, or the holiday itself. What stayed with me was the absence of expectation. No one needed me to behave a certain way or achieve anything. There were no roles to fill or disappointments waiting to happen.

That’s the part that followed me, long after the dust had settled.

Like many people, I grew up in a world shaped by quiet performance. I learned how to adjust, how to please, how to try just a little harder. I was trained to believe that if I did a little more, gave a little extra, then maybe I’d finally be seen as enough.

And it never quite worked.

We often talk about freedom as the ability to do whatever we want, but I’ve come to believe that what most of us are looking for is something else entirely. We want freedom from expectations. Freedom from the pressure to constantly be something to someone else. Freedom from the ongoing evaluation of whether we are doing well enough, being good enough, or living up to something we never agreed to in the first place.

That kind of freedom is quieter, and harder to hold onto. But if you’ve ever felt it, even just once,you know exactly what it is. And you know what it costs to lose it.

I know the house is still there. Owned by the same family. I could go back, thirty-five years later, and maybe even rent the same rooms. But I don’t think I ever will. The memory means more to me than the place ever did, and I’m afraid that returning would collapse the distance I’ve kept between them. I don’t want to find out that it was smaller than I remember, or that the road is paved now, or that the silence has been replaced by holiday traffic. Some places are better left inside the child who first saw them.

I wrote more about that time in my memoir, *Now What*, not as a story of recovery, but as a way to name the things I carried for too long, and what happened when I finally put them down.