I have been thinking about freedom. When I speak with my therapist about freedom, he quotes Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” I think about this theory which was developed during Frankl’s time in a Nazi Prison Camp, Thich Naht Hahn’s philosophies developed during a genocide in Vietnam or even the power and soul of Black music from the Southern United States particularly in the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries.
The stimulus in all of these situations was at its most intense. As in one must give in to their situation and choose to live. It’s a serious Andy Dufresne mentality, no? “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
The reason I’ve been thinking on freedom has less to do with suddenly feeling myself alone and more do with this feeling that it doesn’t matter so much that I am alone. My best friend lives by herself. She’s like the coolest and most self sufficient cat I think I’ve ever met. She just has my complete respect. She owns a little house with a big yard, is in graduate school and teaches full time. I spent a couple days with her this week and while I had already been valuing a sense of comfort in my own skin, I found myself longing for more time to myself.
Perhaps this is a phase in divorce. To be sure I’ve taken some interest in seeing who is out there. I’ve done my fair share of swiping right, but I’m not expecting much out of it and honestly my ideal would be to go have a nice dinner and some drinks and not worry about “it going anywhere.” The best part of hanging out with my friend this week, was the moment when I was painting in her yard, looking at birds and sitting quietly sipping on coffee with her five feet from me in her own chair doing her own thing. I’m finally reaching that sense of self comfort where I can just be around the people that I appreciate without having to uncomfortably filling the air with nonsense. Inevitably women that I end up dating have been subjected to this garbage and I would just like to offer a heartfelt apology to your ears. It’s nice to find myself settling into my skin.
But here I digress again.
I can’t get over the way that the lights in my apartment on Gilman Street attacked me in the early 2010s, the way that the dark seemed to creep in through the windows and strangle me. Loneliness was only drowned when my friends started pouring me five fingers worth glasses of Makers. I could never seem to quiet the tensions in my head. I don’t know if it is having kids or if it is a sense of heading in the right direction, but I do not feel this now. I do not feel alone most nights. I am depressed, but I don’t mind dwelling in it. I know that my reactions are due to depression and even that awareness seems to help ever so slightly. Or maybe the depression itself is its own collection of stimuli.
I’ve felt obsessed with Elliott Smith today and the strange thing is that I no longer must feel depressed to listen. I can certainly ‘feel’ some of his messages as I always have but I don’t feel controlled by that perspective right now. “Between the Bars” in particularly has been hitting me, both because of the high raw chorus, but because of the lyrics…”People you’ve been before, that you don’t want around anymore, they push and they shove and won’t bend to your will….” I am hearing this line with a hope that I’ve never felt before. I have definitely been a number of versions of myself that I no longer want to be around and that is completely okay.
But anyway, freedom… The space between stimulus and reaction. It’s like that sense of approaching a limit. I’m not sure that I am really getting that close to it, but at the same time I can legitimately feel the gap between impetus and response widening. The kids, the kids push those buttons more than anyone else can, and yet they are also the two people on the planet that I find that I love unconditionally. I’m not sure that I can hold off on reacting long enough with them though. I come up short with them even as they are the people that I WANT to come up short with the least.
What’s one to do?