#70 How to be free without being intolerable

What it really means to let others be free, too.

Trying to achieve freedom is such a mess.

The other day, I came across one of those motivational quotes that seem to have escaped from Pinterest:

“There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Who wouldn’t want to spend life “in their own way”? It’s just that everyone else is trying to do exactly the same thing, often right next to you, and the coordination isn’t going particularly well.

Freedom, as it turns out, is a very crowded business.

The bit where everything falls apart

At some point, all of us encounter an event that reveals we’ve been busily avoiding reality — and not just by skipping the news. Sometimes it’s small, like discovering your “passion project” is really an avoidance strategy with a prettier name. Sometimes it’s existential: the creeping suspicion that you’ve been living a life optimized for other people’s approval.

Midlife is often when this realization arrives — though it can strike at any age, really. It’s the a-ha! and WTF? moment rolled into one — like in The Sixth Sense, when you discover Bruce Willis was dead all along, and now you have to mentally rewatch your whole life with this new information. You start seeing your past choices in an unflattering new light.

I’ve written before about the seductive comfort of conformity. Following the social script means you get to feel like you’re doing things “right,” which is enormously reassuring. The trouble begins when you notice that you never actually chose this script, and that upon closer inspection, you’re not sure you agree with large portions of it.

What follows is predictable: rebellion. A search for what you actually believe, what you actually want to say and do. A quest for that elusive “own way” from the inspirational quote.

The clumsy phase

Here’s where it gets awkward. We are spectacularly bad at this bit.

It usually means a period of chaotic experimentation in which we mistake impulsiveness for authenticity. We set boundaries, redraw them, break them, announce them again. We apologize, then over-explain. We confuse being difficult with being deep.

Not many people are thrilled by our experimental phase. What’s worse, we’re often not thrilled by it either — we feel guilty about the experiments, ashamed of testing boundaries, convinced we’re doing it all wrong. Which we probably are, but that’s rather the point of experimenting.

The awkward middle

With time, though, we grow bolder. We become fluent in our new selves and start issuing guidelines: here are my values, here are my limits, and please update your expectations accordingly.

At which point, we discover something deflating: many people are not remotely interested in adjusting. They get annoyed. They push back. They refuse.

And that’s the real test. Because what we secretly want isn’t just freedom — it’s freedom with universal applause. We want to live on our own terms while being admired for doing so. Anything less feels like rejection. But other people’s lack of enthusiasm doesn’t mean we’re wrong; it means they, too, are exercising their freedom to react as they see fit.

The freedom you didn’t want

We want freedom from other people’s expectations, rules, and judgments. We want to set our boundaries and have them respected without question. What used to be called tolerance — the messy art of coexisting with difference — is now often framed as a moral duty to offer unconditional approval.

What we don’t want - though we rarely admit this - is for other people to have the same freedom in relation to us. But unconditional acceptance doesn’t exist. If it did, it would mean nobody’s differences could ever cause discomfort or friction — which is precisely what makes them different in the first place.

“I can be anyone and do whatever I want, and you all should deal with it” - isn’t freedom. It’s just another form of control, demanding that others reshape themselves around us while we refuse to do the same for them.

The inconvenience of being alive

True independence, the uncomfortable kind, means being able to face the reactions of others without either crumbling or attacking. It means accepting that other people’s responses are their business, not yours to control, and then living according to your values anyway.

We all want to be accepted for who we are. The trouble is, so does everyone else, and sometimes “who we are” and “who they are” can’t both get what they want at the same time. Freedom, like oxygen, only works when it’s shared — and occasionally, a bit thin.

The absolute freedom doesn’t exist. What does exist is the choice to be yourself and let others be themselves, even when those selves don’t fit together perfectly. Even when it’s inconvenient. Even when it hurts.

That’s the mess. That’s the freedom. No inspirational quote required.

Until next time,

Nat