Freedom Collage by the Students at Metro Correctional Center

Freedom can sometimes mean freedom from oneself, free from negative emotions like pain and hurt or hate, free from ridicule and judgment or persecution, and free from the expectations of others. Freedom can sometimes mean living in a world that does not revolve around money, power, and greed.
Sometimes freedom means the ability to think freely, or the freedom of choice, but it can also mean freedom from bodily harm.
There is such a thing as a feeling of freedom.
Freedom is sometimes understood through painful experiences of loneliness, joblessness, homelessness, and even prison.
Freedom is sometimes captured in the power and eloquence of expression.
The experience of freedom comes from sharing yourself with the world.
We sometimes forfeit our freedom due to the influence of possessions, status, relationships, and sometimes for the sake of our very lives themselves.
Freedom does have limitations.
Freedom can sometimes mean the single life, freedom from an earlier commitment, dating three different women in the same week:
What I thought was freedom was just another form of bondage,
freed from the bondage of love to a bondage of loneliness.
Freedom from senseless noise of others that consists of total ignorance.
Freedom can sometimes mean: ‘How can I get unstuck, released, or free from such bondage?’ Freedom is sometimes a form of expression.
Freedom is a language that many people do not grasp.
Free to be the man that God destined me to be.
Freedom sometimes meant the ability to go wherever I wanted to go without anyone inquiring about where I was.
Freedom from the fear that others will mistake my kindness for weakness.
Freedom can never be equal.
Even in America, the ‘land of the free,’ we still see some of the worst systemic racism on earth. Freedom struggles have been fought since the beginning of time:
Too many have paid the ultimate price, sacrificing their own lives,
or even the lives of their children, for freedom.
How can freedom be free?
There is a form of freedom that comes from total commitment, even at the risk of losing it all, a form of freedom that can only be discovered through a bold act of courage:
e.g., the courageous acts of resistance by the enslaved against those who enslaved them, or the courage displayed in risking their life to escape enslavement.
Freedom from the imposition of someone else’s will.
Freedom is the capacity to gain wisdom and understanding as well as a practical knowledge of what to do with that wisdom.
Freedom sometimes means, as for Socrates, that you are comfortable with your choices. Freedom means a willingness to sacrifice and lose today for the future of others. Regardless of your physical circumstances, it is possible for anyone to experience true freedom, if they are only willing.
When I got incarcerated, something happened to me: though my body was in a stuck place, my mind became somewhat unstuck.
Freedom is life.