30 Days of Radical Honesty Journalling Challenge – Day 16: What Does Freedom Feel Like To Me-And Where In My Life Do I Still Feel Caged?

Freedom lives in the flicker of a “what if.”

It catches me mid-thought, mid-movement, mid-moment—and suddenly I am gone. Swept up in the shimmer of a possibility, a storyline, a scene that hasn’t yet been written but already lives somewhere in the marrow of my bones. I chase it. I follow it. I let it lead me down winding paths and impossible corners, and when I catch it—when the idea, the feeling, the truth of it finally slows just enough—I press it into paper with words rich in imagery and breathless with imagination.

Writing is my freedom.

My freedom is not loud. It’s not wide-open fields or open roads. It’s quiet. It’s internal. It’s the absolute liberation of living in my inner world—a place where everything is possible and nothing is broken unless I decide it is.

But I am also caged.

Caged by this body that cannot hold a pen like it used to. My fingers, once so fluid and eager, now betray me with stiffness and pain. I am caged by the truth of my physical finiteness—by the betrayal of joints and the ache of time. I am grateful for the speed of my fingers on a keyboard, for the way my left hand has risen like a silent understudy, learning the choreography as my right hand forgets.

I am caged by the hours that fall away when I am writing—how 10,000 words pour out of me and then the price is pain in my hips, in my back, in the places where movement used to be easy. I do not resent the ache, but it is there. It is always there.

I am caged by the ticking of the clock. The way dawn becomes dusk and I must stop writing. I must tend to the other parts of life—meals and emails and things that require my presence in a world that does not run on dreams. I must step away from the world I am building to exist in the one already built.

I am caged by the lack of a pause button. The ache for one. The longing for a slit in time where I could curl up and live inside the story forming behind my eyes. Where I could write until it was done, until every character found their ending, every scene found its rhythm, and every word breathed itself into life. Then, only then, would I peek out again and rejoin the world, untouched and unchanged in my absence.

Freedom is writing.

Cage is everything that interrupts it.

But even in the cage, I write.

Even in the ache, I create.

And maybe—just maybe—that is its own kind of freedom, too.

Peace, Love, and Inspiration,
~Britt Wolfe💚