I Wanted to Be a Bird

The Bird

I used to sit in nature and wish work wasn’t real and I was a bird who could sing and enjoy the simple things all day.

I didn’t think that was telling me anything. I thought I was just tired. But I was actually telling myself the truest thing I knew.

Everything Had to Be Justified

I didn’t realize it at the time. It was just how the world worked to me.

Every feeling had to be structured. Every want had to be right. Every need had to survive interrogation before it was allowed to exist.

The only places I gave myself permission were the small, low-stakes ones. Choosing what to eat. What music to listen to. Doodling. Vacations, where I felt most alive and like I could kinda breathe more. Nature, where nobody was grading me.

Those were the exhaust valves. The places where desire was allowed in micro-doses because the stakes felt low enough.

Everything else had to be earned.

The Book That Wasn’t Supposed to Go Here

I read When I Say No, I Feel Guilty because I wanted to get better at assertiveness. That’s it. Practical. Useful. A skill.

I did not expect it to change my understanding of existence on earth.

But somewhere in it I linked it to creation. And felt that that’s what creating in the world meant. Having a desire and pursuing it unapologetically.

I already knew what that felt like. Every time I doodled — no audience, no goal, no correctness — I was already doing it. I was already practicing having a desire and not justifying it.

So when the book said you are allowed to want without explaining the want, I had already felt that. In the art. In the music. In the afternoons where I just sat and breathed.

I mapped it outward. From the page to my actual life.

Where It Actually Led

Once you feel that — really feel it, not just understand it — something opens.

Because what the book was actually saying, underneath all the scripts and techniques, is that there is a you that exists before the justification. A you that doesn’t need to be earned into existence. A you that simply is.

And I had been visiting that version of myself my whole life. In the doodles. In the food choices. In the vacations. In the nature moments. In the bird wish.

Those weren’t escapes. They were the only places the real me was showing up.

The book didn’t introduce me to freedom. It gave me the language to recognize I had been touching it all along — and the permission to stop treating it like a vacation and start treating it like home.

What I Know Now

I am free. Loved. And allowed to enjoy life and expand my emotions.

The bird I wanted to be was never a fantasy.

She was just waiting for me to stop asking for permission to sing.