The Key Was Never Outside You

It’s tempting to blame something outside ourselves for our lack of freedom. The system. The government. The patriarchy. The teachers who shamed us. The parents who wounded us. The society that never really made space for who we are.

And you’re allowed to.
You deserve compassion for every moment that was unkind, unfair, or unsafe.
Your rage, your grief, your fear — they need room to be heard.
Your tenderness is holy.

But what would be a shame
is if you never realized that the key to your own prison was always in your hand.

Even after the old jailers leave,
it’s often our own mental constructs that keep us locked inside.
We become the ones who uphold the walls.

But what a beautiful thing —
to realize that you can tear them down.
To reclaim the power to dismantle every internal story that said you were smaller, less than, undeserving, or unworthy.

Viktor Frankl once wrote,
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

That is the place where sovereignty begins.
Not by remaining tethered to what shaped you,
but by choosing what defines you now.

Your freedom lives inside your own mind.
The rest of your life will be shaped by the stories you choose to keep.
Choose with care.
Choose your own way.