Asymmetry is freedom

Once I purchased a pair of earrings from a guy in a market. Each earring was made up of one strip of leather and one strip of silver – one earring was longer than the other. Later, wearing the earrings and walking around the market a guy (Bryan swears it was the guy who sold it to me, but I thought it was someone else) came right up to me and said “Asymmetry is freedom!” Such revolutionary overtones! I was immediately sold – asymmetry is freedom I told myself, bugger all this symmetry!

I choose freedom over almost everything but it’s not a rebellion or rejection. I try for freedom inside my life, inside a film industry, inside a loving relationship, inside being a mum, inside being a creator, a friend. I choose freedom over money but I still need money. I choose freedom over being told what to do with work, but that took a long time and there are still lot’s of things that restrict it and lot’s of voices I listen to and want to hear. Freedom for me doesn’t mean stubbornness. Freedom doesn’t mean going solo. Freedom doesn’t mean no responsibilities and no consequences. Freedom means choosing – room to consider and room to choose.

In my work I choose freedom because I think I need it because I am not good at being told what to do. It’s a balance. Routine and freedom. Restriction and freedom. Collaboration and freedom. Budget and freedom. And in creative work I do like restriction, tasks and boundaries, rules and schedules, things that can be fought against and bent and used. Everything in service of the work.

Matt and I had a great conversation about Marie Curie. When reading about her she does seem to be more free from societal expectation that some of her contemporaries. Through the lens of history we see her as someone who defied the rules of her world by studying when women could not and achieving great scientific strides alongside being a mother and a wife at a time when this was unheard of. In doing what she did, she appears free, but in reading about her it’s easy to see how lacking in choices she was, how hard she had to fight for everything she did and how seemingly un-free she must have felt. In so many ways, she did much more than those around her who were free to choose from many paths.

As a mother and loving someone and being committed to the people I work with as well, I understand that there is no such thing as a “clean escape” and so freedom looks very different in real life. You can’t just walk away and suddenly have a life less full of all these responsibilities. They still exist – freedom evolves. So freedom for me sits, happily, inside this real life and one of my jobs is to find it all the time.

But what does freedom mean to you? What do you do with your freedom? What do you fight for and push against?

(i don’t know whose image this is, if you do let me know so i can thank them and credit them)