"When I was a teenager, most arguments with my mother were about clothes. She was baffled by what it was inside myself that I was expressing outside of myself. She could no longer reach or recognize me. And that was the whole point. I was creating a persona that was braver than I actually felt. I took the risk of being mocked on buses and in the streets of the suburbs in which I lived. The secret message that lurked in the zips of my silver platform boots was that I did not want to be like the people doing the mocking. Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong. On a bad day, my mother would ask me, 'Who do you think you are?' I had no idea how to answer that question when I was fifteen, but I was reaching for the kind of freedom that a young woman in the 1970s did not socially possess. What else was there to do? To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom –– it is to mortgage our life to someone else's fear.
"If we cannot at least imagine we are free, we are living a life that is wrong for us."
–– Deborah Levy (b. 1959), South African-born, British novelist, playwright, and poet.
Source: Deborah Levy. The Cost of Living: A Living Autobiography. Toronto, ON: Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2018; p. 121-122.
via: Commonplace Book 2022, 2022, p. 94.
