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We Were Never Taught How to Be Free
I stepped away from borrowed structure and discovered how little practice I had in building my own.
When I left my job, I wasn’t only leaving a workplace. I was stepping away from a structure I had lived inside for years. I knew that if I stayed, time would keep moving and I would keep becoming someone inside a shape I had not fully chosen. What I didn’t realize was how different it is to want freedom than to know what to do with it.
I remember sitting at the table and saying, nothing is wrong. I just need some time to find out who I am. I had done what was expected for a long time, and I could already sense where that path was leading. But how was I ever going to discover what I could actually do if I kept following something invisible?
I thought space and time would bring clarity. Instead, they revealed how much of my life had been held together by external structure. Once that structure was gone, I had to face a harder question: what do we do with our time when we were never really taught that it was ours?
What I found first was the desert. Land with no shape. But then I began to dig, and I found the minimal pieces that belonged to me: dance and working out. So I placed them on the ground. In the open space of endless time, those were the first things that held me together.
We are taught how to function inside structure, but not how to build our own, and even less how to be free. We imagine freedom as getting to do whatever we want. But freedom has little use if we don’t know what we want, or if we’ve never learned how to listen for it. Sometimes, freedom begins by leaving the oasis and walking into the desert, not yet knowing what will hold.
© Paula Rojas Studio2026