Here is a list of fifty reasons I’m grateful—small and big freedoms I have the privilege to enjoy.
Some of these are trivial, while others may sound a bit more profound. Many of these are freedoms from constraints that have historically or culturally existed. A few are self-imposed limits I’ve carried for years, only now realizing they were never truly binding because they were just deeply rooted societal norms that prize conformity over individuality.
I’m grateful today that I have the freedom to:
- Skip a workout day
- Stop reading a book or a movie that doesn’t hold my interest anymore
- Vote
- Let go. Without holding resentments or grudges
- Converse in the language of my choice
- Travel where I want without worrying about restrictions
- Say No
- Be outside at midnight and still feel safe
- Have decided who to spend my life with
- Shower when I want, thanks to a 24/7 water supply
- Do whatever I want with my time—write, doomscroll, bingewatch…
- Eat what I want, when I want. Cereal for dinner? No problem.
- Say what’s on my mind
- Dress how I please
- Not follow a recipe
- Not worry about my image or my airport looks
- Practice religion. Or not
- Carry a whole library on the Kindle to a vacation stop and fall asleep after the first ten pages of the first book and never make any progress
- Drive where I want
- Choose who I hang out with
- Move freely in public thanks to vaccines without worrying about COVID. Or the plague.
- Decide what “enough” is, and retire when I want
- Wake up when I please
- Connect with a loved one at any time, thanks to the cellphone
- Not go to a social gathering and not be hounded by FOMO
- Listen to my favorite song on repeat a hundred times
- Voice unpopular opinions without retribution
- Be surrounded by more books than I’ll have time to read in this life, and not be judged
- Be myself
- Turn 50 (Just a hundred years ago, the average life expectancy was 33 years).
- Be relevant at work
- Listen to books while doing chores
- Not feel the pressure to people-please
- Enjoy group chats and the endless stream of Good Morning and Happy Birthday messages (it’s always someone’s birthday!)
- Not needing to go to the bank or to the DMV to renew my license
- Log off work early on Friday.
- Have friends I can call at 3 a.m.
- Serve aging parents
- Have aging parents
- Learn music, seamlessly, from teachers on a different continent
- Still wonder about what I want to be when I grow up
- Forget unimportant (and important) dates and events, thanks to reminders, alerts, and alarms
- Invite friends over without feeling the need to clean the house maniacally before they come
- Go out for a run at 4 a.m. or 11 p.m. because it is safe to do so
- Work from anywhere, thanks to the internet (dating myself) and Zoom
- Order milk on Instacart after finding out I ran out of milk in the middle of an important meeting
- Not having to keep going to the doctor every six weeks to know if I’ll survive (long story, but all good now)
- Never needing to shovel snow
- To write this post. Or not.
- Finally, the freedom to be a good, decent human being. Something I’m still trying to appreciate.