We have freedom to be responsible for our own lives

I’m invigorated by the letters I’ve received about my July 4 column on freedom and responsibility. I learned some valuable things from your letters.

I feel touched and inspired that you took the time to write, explain, persuade and try to get me to see the bigger picture. I got it. Thank you. And your words deserve some deeper attention.

Our nation continuously wrestles with the question of freedom and responsibility: Who will define it, how do we apply it to reflect our current times and how do we protect it, not just for some, but for everyone?

In some ways, the whole point of a newspaper is to address these topics by reporting on the judicial system, following politics, investigating issues, sharing information and trying to maintain a context of responsible journalism.

But there is a deeper, personal layer of freedom and responsibility that needs to be discussed and explored. How do we apply it, define it and protect it in our daily lives?

That is really the heart of what I wanted to explore in my July 4 column. I picked a very narrow starting point to personalize this, and I just didn’t take it as deeply as it needed to go. Here is another attempt.

I am good at responsibility. I have defined much of my adulthood by the responsibilities I have shouldered. However, I had to learn to not carry more than a reasonable load. I learned there is a big price for carrying too much on my back. Too much responsibility can drag the body and spirit into an undertow, an emotional bankruptcy. And in carrying too much, we may be taking away something from someone else.

I learned about responsibility from my grandfather. He was a firefighter in his community, a brother who helped support his sisters, a husband, a father and a grandfather who raised two of his grandchildren.

He rescued his daughter from every single mistake she ever made and financially supported her his entire life. His financial support carried his daughter through 40 years of addiction to drugs.

He recently phoned me and said he realized now in hindsight that he took too much responsibility for his daughter. He believed he had made an error.

Our conversation left me thinking about how I worshipped him as a child. I thought of his actions as heroic. But his heroic behavior also frightened me.

As I became a young adult, I realized that I desperately wanted to be responsible for myself. I didn’t want to need him the way that he perhaps wanted to be needed. I didn’t want to set my life on fire and need to be rescued.

I worked hard to prove to him and myself that I was responsible. I believed the more responsible I was, the more I would earn my freedom, maybe not freedom in the big national sense, but freedom from my family legacy.

Like my grandfather, I overdid it on the responsibilities. Not quite the way he did; I had my own version of being hyper-responsible. There was a price for this hyper-responsibility and one price is that I didn’t feel like I had enough freedom. My time, my thoughts, everything was too bound up in my responsibilities.

Figuring out how to balance my load took me nearly two decades. Letting go of certain responsibilities required courage and trust that other people are capable and could manage without me.

I know this is a struggle for many people, not just for me, not just for my grandfather.

It is easy to tell when someone is carrying too much. They talk about having no time, they are stalked by physical illness and they secretly wonder if they have lost their purpose. A version of this same experience can happen to us collectively as a nation.

I was visiting the United Nations recently and I was overwhelmed by the size of the struggle for freedom and peace. I felt like it had taken me so long to find some answers to this on a personal level, the size of it on a global scale was overwhelming, while at the same time hopeful, inspiring and deeply meaningful.

We have come so far at trying to define these things and yet we have so far to go. The search for defining this on a personal, national or global level requires our complete attention. Thank you for writing to me and stopping me in my tracks to pause, rethink and reflect.

Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother, and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@ heraldnet.com.