By Helen Elizabeth Hokanson
What does freedom mean to me?
Since this question of freedom was posed on the first of September, I’ve been struggling to articulate just what freedom does mean to me. Do I answer to the backdrop of BLM protests, and respond in the context of the larger world? Maybe write a poem about systemic racism and my relationship with it. Or do I focus on the personal? An essay about the irony of people telling me they just want me to have what they have, while being alternately ignored or screamed at by the spouse they pity me for not having. Why would I want that? Or is there something in between I might place under the microscope? So many ways to be free. So many ways to be bound.
As October crawls along, bringing prompts end, I still can’t quite put my finger on how to address this question no matter which way I turn it. It’s a problem even my insomnia can’t cure. Now there’s something I wish to be free from. I had given up hope that I would be able to post a response. Until this morning. I am Reading Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, where she perfectly articulates this slippery, twisty concept.
It’s a long passage, and I hope Rebekah doesn’t mind me sharing it.
“When I was small and just learning how to do life in my body, I didn’t hesitate, didn’t hold back, didn’t worry how it would look, didn’t look for cues or ask for a line. My imagination ruled. I saw no incongruities in being both a puppy rolling around in the mud and a poised princess. I wore dress-up gowns on afternoon trips to the library and drew magic-marker purple diamonds across my forearms and shins. I didn’t wonder what dancing could or should be; I moved my body to music and called it dancing. I used the shelves and cabinets in the kitchen to climb onto the counter and crawled headfirst down the hardwood stairs at top speed. I scooted around the neighborhood on a red tricycle with streamers flowing out of the handlebars. I was entirely free to be, driven by the innovation my body inspired. This is the wild emancipation I wish for all of us – a world where we are all free to be, to move, to exist in our bodies without shame; a world that isn’t interested in making all of its humans operate in the exact same way; a world that instead strives to invite more, include more, imagine more. That world sees the humans existing on the margins and says, You have what we want! What barriers can we remove so we can have you around? What do you need? How can we make that happen?” <
I’ve now read this paragraph about ten times. More by the time you have read it and I’m gob smacked each time. Wild emancipation. Yes! Wild emancipation. Freedom to be can be nothing less.