I have been good. I have been bad. Now I just want to be free.

“I have been good. I have been bad. Now I just want to be free.” ~Glennon Doyle

I heard this on a podcast today and it punched me through my heart. It is so true for me that I’m mad I didn’t write it myself.

I was a wild adolescent. Like After School Special wild. Like, lucky-to-be-alive, wild. I told myself I was free. That I was a bad ass who refused to be controlled. The reality was I was desperate for any attention I could get. I dealt myself out as a commodity, never realizing it’s the consumer who has the power, not the product. The downward spiral was cut short by the forced sobriety of a pregnancy and the newfound sense of responsibility that came with it. Thank goodness for huge victories.

Becoming a young mother screeched my crazy train to an abrupt halt, just shy of going off the rails. I decided immediately that from then on I would be good. I would be the perfect mother. I would undo the mistakes of the past, both my parents’ and my own. I won’t claim that I was “perfect” the first couple years; I was still a baby myself, growing up alongside my child. But with each passing year the bar I set for myself, got higher and higher. By the time I had been married for 8 years and on my second baby, I was so wrapped up in perfectionism, people pleasing and positivity bypassing, I convinced myself that I was finally good.

Except that was only partially true. I believed I was good-ish, but I still never felt like I was good *enough*. All the insecurity that had driven me headlong into danger and self destruction, had now driven me into constantly trying to prove that I wasn’t that person anymore. Only I was. I may have looked different on the outside, I may have made better choices, but I was also locked into the rigid idea I had of what it meant to be a good spouse, a good mother, a good person. Ultimately, on the inside, I was still the same scared little girl, just trying to be loved.

I have been bad. I have been good. Both of them were cages. Now it’s time to be free.

Freedom is being the wind beneath my own wings. Buoyed by self love and the ability to glide away from the judgements of others whilst singing my own song. Even in my freedom I still spend time in my cage. There is comfort in the familiar. Beating myself up about it only reinforces the lock. So now I leave the cage door open and hope to repurpose it into a bookshelf someday.