Freedom is not, as I once thought, the ability to go anywhere. It is the hard-won permission to stop going somewhere.
Cory Allen’s line stopped me cold: some things deserve your absence, not your energy. There is a version of me that would have read that and immediately thought of people. Situations. Obligations I inherited rather than chose. The version of me reading it now thinks of something quieter and more personal: the internal conversations I keep having with things that have already ended.
Real freedom lives in the withdrawal. Not the dramatic exit, not the public boundary-setting, not the explanation anyone asked for. Just the quiet decision to remove your energy from the equation entirely. To let something exist without your participation in it.
I have spent years confusing engagement with respect. Thinking that if something mattered, I owed it my attention, my analysis, my attempt at resolution. Freedom has taught me otherwise. Some things are not problems to be solved. They are simply rooms you no longer need to enter.
Absence is not abandonment. It is discernment made physical.
This is what freedom actually feels like for me: not the open road, not the lack of obligation. It is the moment I realise I have stopped feeding something that was never going to feed me back. The moment my energy comes home.
That is the whole practice, really. Bringing it home.
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