Hi, lovely Stopgap readers. I’m back from a summer hiatus and hope you haven’t given up on me.
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From the time I was a kid, my family has spent the third week of August down the shore — the unwelcome Sunday of every summer. Floating in the Atlantic, I’d close my eyes and try to let the anxieties of the impending school year wash over me with the saltwater, but I couldn’t shake the grief of summer ending, and the apprehension of autumn beginning. Summer meant no homework, few obligations, or a future to think about. Summer was freedom. And I was never prepared to give it up.
As an adult, we continued to return to Wildwood Crest, and my Summer Sunday Scaries intensified. The third week of August meant: At 18, saying goodbye to my summer boyfriend; at 22, frantically scanning Craigslist for an affordable room in a Washington group house; at 27, preparing to send documents to the South Korean government for a “fresh start” teaching kids halfway around the world. Summer vacation was nothing more than a reminder that fall was coming…the season of change, deadlines, and productivity. What’s next, what’s next, what’s next?
This year, I’m 31. It’s the second week of September, and I’m spending it down the shore with my parents. Wildwood is peaceful at this time of year — empty restaurants, beaches, and ocean waters. I’ve been running by the bay in the mornings, trying to figure out how to hold on to freedom for longer than a season. Does it mean releasing myself from something, or someone? Or giving in to them? Why does the prospect of committing to any decision — any life direction — make me feel so shackled?
As Esther Perel points out, the way we talk about freedom is often a contradiction. The word “surrender” comes up often, even though its definition is to submit or give up oneself to another. In my own search for freedom, I find myself so often grappling with conflicting desires for control and surrender, autonomy and dependence, novelty and stability. Is freedom having the ability to choose from an endless list of possibilities? Or is it the release from the burden of having to choose at all?
In the fleeting sense, I feel free when: writing, dancing, and swimming; I am alone, bra-less in my apartment on a rainy Sunday with no obligations, people to answer to, or compromises to make; I am hyper-focused on a task or a creative project; I am engrossed in a song, podcast, or book. I am surrounded by a group of old friends, when I don’t need to perform or explain; I can speak my mind without retribution; I am allowed to sit in silence; I step foot in a new country for the first time; I am giving into another human being, limbs, and lips roaming with abandon.
I have a new job now, and it’s one I never quite envisioned for myself: editor. Sometimes editing feels like the opposite of freedom. Besides the the lack of freedom that comes with the constraints of middle management — being pushed and pulled by the demands of others in all directions — editing is about rule-following, fact-checking, and problem-solving. While writing, in its purest form, can feel like watercolor painting — waving a hand freely across the page and seeing where it lands — editing a news story is more like engineering. To polish someone else’s work of creativity takes a certain kind of intense focus and care, which can leave me feeling, at times, totally drained. Solving a math problem can be fulfilling, but “freeing?” Not so much.
I’m also in a new relationship, which has me thinking a lot about the freedoms we must be willing to give up in order to give in to another person. Romantic partnerships, at their best, should offer freedom: Freedom to be your most authentic self, freedom to love, and freedom to take risks, knowing you have a safety net to fall back on if you fail. But monogamous relationships, especially for straight women, also seem guaranteed to confine and restrict. I’ve always sought the kind of romantic love that would expand my world, but ultimately, I know I’ll have to compromise on what exactly that world may end up looking like.
I wish I could wrap this post up with a bow, but I don’t have any concrete answers about what long-lasting freedom looks like, or how to find it. I did have the fortune of stumbling upon Mary Oliver’s “I Go Down the Shore,” just as I was staring into the ocean and the late-summer blues started sinking in:
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
It feels like Oliver’s polite way of saying, “Chill, bitch. I’m sick of your shit.” Freedom for me, and maybe for you, might just mean accepting the moment that you are in, without dwelling too deeply on what’s behind or ahead. The tide, no matter the season, will keep doing its thing.