Dirty Freedom

By Mr Vertigo

(I)

Since we are going to be judged, inevitably and with no escape, by eyes that know nothing of the depths or the origin of our decisions, we should at least have the right, the duty, even, to present ourselves however we please before that judgment.

What sense is there in trying to please an invisible tribunal that has already handed down its verdict?

If they are going to misread us, ridicule us, lock us inside labels we did not choose, then let them do it for something we chose to show with full awareness. Let them judge our mask, yes, but one we designed with our own hands, not the one they put on us at birth or the ones they kept fastening on afterward. If the world is going to invent a story about us, let it do so while confronting the one we wrote in our own words

A person becomes an adult on the day he stops apologizing for existing. The day he stops bowing his head before idiots disguised as family, friends, lovers, saviors. Those who claim to love you while teaching you the proper way to betray yourself. Those who tolerate you as long as you do not make too much trouble, as long as you do not think too much on your own, as long as you do not step outside the miserable script that lets them sleep at night. They wanted something recognizable. Something functional. Something that fit inside their world without calling it into question

And the hardest part was not walking away. The hardest part was discovering that, deep down, you had never really been inside. That you were not an exception, nor a mystery, nor even an endearing wound to anyone.

You were useful as long as you fit. Pleasant as long as you did not make anyone uncomfortable. Almost admirable as long as you served as a mirror for what others needed to believe about themselves. And the moment you began to choose for real, the moment a direction of your own appeared, they stopped seeing you. Many of them without even noticing

That is where a kind of solitude begins that resembles no other. Because rejection at least confirms you were visible. To discover you had never really been seen is something else entirely. And worse, to understand that what you took for love was little more than a precarious form of habit, of mutual need, of emotional management. Even so, it is possible they loved you. In their own way. That is the filthiest part. That there are no clear monsters. That you cannot lock everything inside a clean accusation. That the damage comes mixed with real gestures, with clumsy tenderness, with the radical inability to reach the center of anyone

And then there comes a moment when you expect nothing anymore. A faith simply falls away. An old thread snaps. A waiting you had carried long before you had words goes dark. Comfort leaves. Self-esteem leaves. That small fiction of overcoming that people who have never truly fallen are so fond of leaves too. What remains is a strange silence. Colder air. A clarity that breathes through the pupils. And from there, from that deserted floor, something begins again.

That, too, has a mistaken name. You can call it freedom.

II

But one should be careful not to be seduced by that first sensation of strength. The beggar is still there.

Still there is the one who asks for an exact gaze, a just sentence, a belated repair, a sign that in the end he was not as alone as he suspected. Still there is the part that fantasizes that someone might return one day and say: I was wrong about you. It will not happen. Or not in the way that part needs it to. And one has to live with that. Without theater. Without grandeur. Without turning the wound into a noble title.

Freedom does not consist in killing the beggar. That is the dream of the peddlers of purity, the administrators of the soul, all those experts who speak of healing with the same voice people once used to speak of obedience. The beggar is not killed. He is recognized. You learn to hear him breathing behind every gesture. You learn to tell when he is trembling and when he is in command. Because he knows how to command as well. He knows how to become a tyrant..

There are beggars who demand. Who blackmail. Who cry in order to drag the other person into the center of their hole. That creature knows every fissure, every remnant of hunger, the exact point to press in order to return you to the old servitude. And if you hand him the wheel, he speaks from resentment. He gets into your voice. Looks through your eyes. Chooses for you. He begins to use your wound as a weapon against the world and against those who come near carrying something clean in their hands.

That is why one has to learn how to remain with him without kneeling. To carry him without worshipping him. To hear him without obeying him. To let him exist without allowing him to pass judgment on your whole life. That is a darker discipline than any cheap spirituality. There is no enlightenment there. There is vigilance. Mud. Days when that part almost persuades you. Days when one would rather go back to begging for love than keep holding up the void. Days when it would seem easier to return to the cage, apologize, fit again, let oneself be loved under conditions. And yet something can no longer do it. Something has seen too much.

For years I wanted to understand where the damage came from. What part had been done to me and what part I had done to myself. I searched for causes, names, scenes, traumas, mechanisms. I wanted to separate the blows I had received from the ones I later dealt myself. But there comes a point when that division, too, begins to rot. Outside and inside stop seeming like separate territories. The world gets into you and from within comes back out distorted. What wounds you outside always finds a chamber prepared for it. What you hide inside ends up taking form in what you look at, in what you choose, in what you repeat. There is no refuge. No clean place. To inhabit oneself begins when one renounces that fantasy.

That is why I distrust anyone who comes promising a resolved version of consciousness. A spotless peace. A self already integrated, healed, functional, reconciled. There the same old domestication returns, only perfumed. What they want is for you to smile while you bleed. I do not believe them.

The beggar is you in your most humiliated truth. Also in your most human one. He stays. He resists correction. He outlasts every attempt at transcendence. He sits at the table.

III

And life is not only this underground.

There are moments when something breaks in and suspends the sentence without abolishing it. A chord. A glance. A night that for a second seems to weigh nothing. A form of beauty that saves nothing, explains nothing, and yet sustains. It lasts only as long as it pleases. It answers to nothing. It arrives the way all true things do. And when it touches the center, even if only in passing, one understands that the world is not made only of administered misery. There is something else. Something that does not redeem, but accompanies.

Perhaps that is why art, when it is art, does not consist in decorating pain or making it bearable. It consists in opening it without shame and letting others look inside, even if they turn away, even if they laugh, even if they understand nothing. An artist is someone who dares to hold up the mirror without correcting the reflection. Someone who leaves the wound exposed without turning it into a sermon. Someone who does not ask permission to show what is there.

Each person will see only what he can bear. Some will see nothing but excess. Others will recognize something of their own and recoil in disgust, as if the mirror had betrayed them. It does not matter. The task was never to please. The task was not to lie.

At this point I expect very little. I am neither better nor worse for it. And certainly not safe. I still carry mud on me. I still have scars. I still have the beggar breathing in some inner room. But I walk differently now. With the strange dignity of someone who does not owe himself entirely to anyone.

And even so, I love them.

Those who were there. Those who left. Those who barely brush against my life and continue on their way with their own invisible burden. I love this human experience for its clumsiness, for its brutality, for the absurd flashes it sometimes throws off in the middle of the dungheap. I vibrate at almost no one's frequency anymore. I have stopped expecting to be understood completely. The mold they offered me in exchange for a little warmth, I have no use for it.

I walk with the mud, with the beggar, with the irreparable.

And at last, perhaps only now, without belonging.