Sometimes, I watch the sky and wonder what freedom feels like. I used to tell people, until I realized that my words fell on them, lost them, blinded them. They would look at me with eyes that were soulless in their captivity, and they would not understand. “You are free,” they would say. But they were wrong.

I am not who I am

I have no voice

I am a slave

Or then I see a man or a woman who is free and I come alive with desire, envy for what these people possess. Anger burns me when I see the ones who do not treasure their great gift. For it is a gift. If you are free, you are you, and you have a voice and no one can make you be silent. Not when you are free.

I am not free. People say things of me, things that are not true, and I am these things because they have taken away my voice.

They say I do not care.

They say I do not love.

They say I do not live.

I do not understand how it is that their words can make me become these things, when inside I am not. Even the other captives say them and when they speak, I am bound.

My chains are invisible. They are of iron.

Every day, every hour, I work at the locks, beat them, grind them, tear at them. I cannot match their strength. See, my hands bleed. They are raw, my heart is sore, my soul weary from this endless and deathless struggle. My hands hurt, and when I touch others I hurt them and I do not know why. Blood covers my hands and stains my clothes and everything I touch and I think it is my fault.

Sometimes I wish I were dead.

Then I remember that I am.

Often I think about this masquerade that we are living. We tell people who they are and they believe it. They become it. If I peeled away the face and the life that you put on, who would you be? What would I find in the you that is really you? Would it be beautiful?

One day I stepped out of the masquerade ball for a moment. I felt life in every fiber of my being, but I looked back and I was terrified. I looked around and I saw eyes that said, “You are a fool. This is not you.”

But it was.

Only, their words pulled my chains and I was drawn back into the whirling, vibrating mass of play-actors. They reminded me of who they thought I was and they reminded me that they still had my voice. So I had to go back.

But something happened in that one moment that they did not expect: I had caught a glimpse of the sun.

I didn’t forget, and I went again. And again. And each time I moved further, and I found others who were outside the masquerade. We spoke to each other, and it was then that I discovered that my voice was with me and I had not left it among the shadows.

At last, one glorious day beneath my own sun, I took off my face and stepped out of my costume. I looked upon the world with my own eyes and in that instant, like a flash of lightning, I felt what it was to be alive.

I was free.

I stared down at my mask and my disguise and I laughed and I danced in the free air of my new world. For the first time I drew my own breath into my own body and for the first time I heard with my own ears and for the first time I really truly felt. I wondered how I could have lived beneath that face for so many years. I wondered how I had let words become my chains and I wondered if this was what it was like to be alive.

My iron chains had broken. I found myself beneath the words that others had made me become, the words that had crippled me. Then I took the words and I made them new, and vowed that I would not speak them upon captives, to make them what they were not, to enslave them. Instead, I would help them step out of the mad dance, take off their faces, and resurrect.