“Freedom.”

Freedom

Is just frosting

On somebody else’s 

Cake—

And so must be

Till we 

Learn how to 

bake.

— “Freedom,” Langston Hughes

I think the end of May is always a little tough for me because it’s the transition from the pace of the school year — go go go but kind of in a good way, in the sense that it keeps you going — to a pace that’s a lot more quiet and open. What am I supposed to do with all of this free time? And not really free time because I have things to do, but the things I have to do are now mine to do or not do, to do in the morning or do at night, to do today or tomorrow, and that kind of freedom—the freedom to choose how your day unfolds—can at times feel a little stifling. 

I feel like I’m this weird mix of personalities where sometimes I’m very lackadaisical and go with the flow and sometimes—especially when left to my own devices—I can be very type A and neurotic. In social situations, I tend to just improv it, to sense the direction of things and navigate as I go, but when it comes to my time and my work and who I want to be, I can be impossibly in need of control. I don’t know these days how to just wake up and get to what I get to when I get to it. I don’t know how to lie on the couch and just let the day melt away with movies, for example, or snacks or video games. I actually set a timer for ten minutes to play my Nintendo Switch so that I can relax into the structure of that free time. I guess I’m a sucker for structure, a sucker for feeling like how I’m spending my time is taking me somewhere. I’m afraid maybe that if I go with the flow now, I might wake up in a few years in some kind of professional and/or personal abyss. 

Nina Simone has famously said that what freedom means to her is “no fear.” Maybe this is about an ability to relax into yourself, to be yourself without worrying too much about how other people will perceive you, about how even the future you will perceive the you today. Maybe “no fear” means giving yourself the space to be, and I can’t think of anything as free as that: total space to dress how you want and to say how you feel, to sometimes do what you want to do all day and to speak up when you’re uncomfortable. I love Nina Simone’s definition, and I love how Langston Hughes defines freedom too. Freedom as “frosting / [o]n somebody else’s / [c]ake” until you yourself “[l]earn how to / bake.” Freedom as something you’ll only witness in others, witness from afar, until you learn how to articulate and then to create freedom for yourself—whatever that might look like.

For me, I think it’s an understanding that yes, if you boil me down, I am probably more Type A than I am go with the flow, but there is still room in that Type A-ness. There is room to play my Switch (even if I need a timer to relax into it). There is room to go on walks, to stretch, to drink water. There is room to read (!) — I’m reading this book called Old Enough by Haley Jakobsen right now, and it is at times intense and serious but also very queer and fun. There is room to go new places—intellectually, geographically, emotionally and so on—and room to revisit the old. Even if I have to schedule all of this into my overflowing, cramped planner, even if I have to build this freedom into a structure that also houses the work I need to get finished, the less go with the flow elements of my life, there is still the freedom to do that, to start new hobbies even. I can, for example, very choppily play “Under the Sea” on the piano,  practice French in the car while my boyfriend naps in the passenger seat, and maybe even one day—if we’re going to take Hughes’ assertion literally—scoop a finger into all of the frostings in the world. 

Image: Langston Hughes