The Things We Call Freedom
by Subayah Kamrul, Minaret College
Years 9 – 10 Performance Poetry Finalist
There is a wall inside every child. Not built from stone— but from should and shouldn’t, from could be better,
from why can’t you be more like— and we learn to build it early. One brick for every mistake. One for every comparison.
One for every time we were almost enough but not quite enough to make somebody stop asking for more. And nobody tells us
that walls are easiest to build when you are the one carrying the bricks. So we build. We build until the sky
becomes a rumour. Until freedom is something we can spell but cannot taste.
Until the horizon looks less like a destination and more like a dare. And still—
we are told to climb. Climb higher. Reach further. Be better.
Be brighter. Be everything except human. There is a standard
somewhere above the clouds that nobody has ever touched, yet somehow we are all failing to reach it.
Isn’t that beautiful? How cleverly they made perfection into a finish line that moves whenever we approach it.
We run. God, how we run. We run until our lungs
forget what breathing feels like. We run until achievement becomes another word for exhaustion.
We run until we can no longer remember whether the footsteps behind us belong to our dreams
or our fear. And they call this ambition. But I have begun to wonder
if ambition is sometimes just fear wearing expensive clothes. Because I know what it is
to hold yourself so tightly that even your own heartbeat sounds like an apology.
I know what it is to become sweet because bitterness
makes people uncomfortable. To ripen on command. To smile on schedule.
To hide the bruises beneath the skin and call it strength.
But fruit was never meant to remain perfect. Touch an apple long enough
and you will leave a mark. Leave it in the sun and it changes.
Cut it open and you discover that the beauty was never
on the surface anyway. Maybe we are like that. Maybe life is not about
remaining untouched. Maybe living means being bruised by the world
and choosing not to become bitter. Because beyond these walls there is a sea.
I know it. I have never seen it, but I know it.
I know because somewhere inside every person there is a voice
that keeps asking: Is this all? Is this all the world is?
Four walls. A narrow sky. A life measured
by how well you obey the shape someone else drew for you.
Or is there something beyond? Something wild. Something frightening.
Something free. Maybe freedom is not the absence of fear.
Maybe freedom is being terrified and walking anyway.
Maybe the price of freedom has never been comfort. Maybe it is certainty.
Maybe it is approval. Maybe it is the courage to lose the version of yourself
that everyone else was comfortable loving. And that terrifies me.
Because I have spent years becoming somebody I could be proud of—
only to realise I was becoming somebody I could be tolerated as.
So today, I am putting down the bricks. Not because the wall
has disappeared. It hasn’t. But because I finally understand
that I do not need to finish building my prison just because everyone else
has already built theirs. Let the standard rise. Let the mountain grow teeth.
Let the horizon stay impossibly far. I will still walk. Not because I know
where I am going. Not because I know what waits beyond the sea.
But because for the first time in my life, I would rather face
an uncertain horizon than live forever beneath a certain ceiling.
And if I fall— let the world call me unfinished. If I break—
let it call me imperfect. If I bruise— let the mark remain.
Because I have finally learned something the walls never wanted me to know:
A life does not become valuable because it was flawless. A fruit does not become beautiful
because it never bruised. A bird does not prove its wings by staying inside the cage.
And a person— a person does not become free when the walls come down.
They become free when they stop believing the walls were ever
the whole world. So I will go.