I Will Speak Until I’m Free

Because my voice matters

I was born very, very close to the bicentennial. So close that my birthday invariably involves fireworks of some kind. So close that I usually end up getting a three day holiday weekend to celebrate it.

My mom always joked that she tried to talk her body into giving birth on the 4th so that I could have a literal holiday for a birthday. But clearly, I did not want to share my special day.

Because of my due date, the first name my mom picked out for me was Liberty. I was her first baby, so she was still in that phase of early motherhood where she thought stuff like that was cute. She changed her mind midway through the pregnancy though, because she didn’t want anyone to call me Libby. She liked the dignity and weight of Liberty and wasn’t keen on the idea of anyone chopping it up and repackaging it.

So she and my dad chose the name that’s on my birth certificate, which is actually vaguely patriotic in its own way. It worked out just fine, in the end, as I prefer my name to Liberty.

But because of this story, I’ve always had a fondness for the word and its meaning. And perhaps because of the day of my birth, I’ve also always had a fondness for revolutions — particularly the American Revolution. (Go ahead, ask me the date of the Boston Tea Party. Or the Boston Massacre. These numbers are carved into my memory.) And I love what the American Revolution inspired across the world. When I visited Paris ten years ago, I had to see all the important sites related to the French Revolution and it was as captivating as I knew it would be.

Even though I’m an empathetic introvert who often just wants to fade into the wallpaper to make sure no one talks to me, I also have a secret side to my personality — a loud, screaming, revolutionary harpy who wants to right every injustice, topple every patriarchal, white supremacist institution, and burn our corporatocracy to the ground. I might even occasionally fantasize about hanging certain people from their toenails while poking their belly buttons with hot irons. Because if I’m going to participate in a revolution, then I might as well take it all the way, right?

Sometimes, I wonder how big a part of myself this revolutionary is. I’ve always thought she was just a little crumb hidden away somewhere within my mild countenance. But other times, I suspect that she is much bigger than I thought.

Let’s give her a name, shall we? To make it less confusing? What shall we call her?

Well, Liberty, of course.

What if Liberty is actually who I really am and the wallflower in me developed because of my depression and anxiety? Maybe the shy introvert I was just got even more introverted because it was so hard to fight the louder, bigger personalities in my family. Maybe I even got lost in other people’s perception of me.

There is one thing I know I lost for sure: my voice. I grew up in a family filled with women born under fire signs. My Aries cousin. My fierce Leo aunt, grandmother, mother, and sister. They were loud and they always had to be in charge. In my memory, I can flip through so many scenes in which I struggled to be heard over their roaring, over their fiery personalities. I think I mostly gave up by the time I was in 3rd grade. It was a futile battle — I never won.

I started to believe something dangerous, something that would haunt me for most of my life. I started to believe that my voice didn’t matter.

In some ways, it’s no surprise to me that I decided to become a writer at such a young age. I think even at ten years old, I understood that I’d have to find a quiet way to express myself. I maybe didn’t have a voice, but I could speak on the page without being interrupted. I could make room to hear myself.

It was better than nothing.

I poured all of myself into my writing for most of my life. I didn’t date in high school. I didn’t get drunk with my friends or try smoking or drugs. I spent all my nights and weekends at my desk, scribbling down my stories.

I can’t say that much changed into adulthood. I maybe haven’t had the most adventurous life. But I have no regrets. The process of speaking my truth onto the page was more important than anything.

At 18, I branched out from fiction and started writing articles about things that were affecting me: eating disorders, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, low self-esteem, rape culture, conservation. I even had a few of these printed in local publications.

I needed to speak about what I was going through and what was important to me, and that was the only way I knew how to do it. On the page.

Throughout my life, I used my writing as a tool to help me through every hardship, from heartbreak to depression, from professional failures to financial struggles. Sometimes, I wrote just for myself. Sometimes, I submitted things to magazines and online publications. Sometimes, I posted things on my blogs.

All of it helped me feel a little bit freer.

But there were still things I couldn’t quite tackle. Issues around my sexuality, for instance, or the troubles I’d dealt with in my family, the dysfunctions that I had always felt I had to hide from the world.

The last ten years were somehow the worst, with my parents’ divorce, my own breakup, and other deep hardships. So much of my writing danced around it all. I could pour out into my journals, but never on my blogs, never in pieces I intended to publish.

Some part of me still felt that I didn’t have the right to speak. And I still believed my voice didn’t matter.

One day, in early January, Liberty rolled right out of my body and turned to face me as we laid there in bed. She said, “You’re going to start writing about sexuality this year. No more arguments. I’m done waiting for you to catch up.”

I struggled as I tried to figure out how to do something that felt so scary at the time. And somehow, Liberty led me to Medium, where I took the plunge.

And yes, it felt like a fucking revolution. Some part of the structure of the prison that had held me for so long felt like it had crumbled. And yes, something was burning, somewhere.

Over time, I began to write, just a little bit, about my family, barely dipping my toes into the painful stories that lie beneath the surface. And it felt good. Like another corner of that prison fell to the ground in a pile of rubble.

I want more. I’m hungry for more. No…I’m starving.

I want to be able to tell every story — the good ones, but also the ugliest, saddest, scariest stories I have. I want a space to speak until I’m free. I want to teach myself to believe that my voice matters.

I assumed I would accomplish all of this and more over at Wilder, but that place has become the home of the stories about being a wild woman, my nature essays and poems, spirituality, conservation, and maybe a little magic. The work I was posting there about my miscarriage, my family, and my relationships didn’t feel like they fit.

I realized I needed another place where I could scream (or rather, scribble) for my freedom. A place to talk about family, politics, mental health, and myself.

And so…Liberty was born. She is going to throw tea into the harbor, storm the palace gates, set shit on fire, and just scream.

Because we all need to be free. We deserve to be free.

And yes, our voices matter.

© Yael Wolfe 2019