Life on My Terms

My need to explain myself was louder when I was younger. My confidence filled rooms, asserting things I only half understood, held opinions the way you hold something you're not sure you're allowed to put down. I look back at some of those positions and wince. But I was also learning something in that period that took years to finish learning: what my own voice actually sounds like when it isn't performing for a room.

Over time, my fire settled into something steadier and more grounded. Quieter, but far more powerful. These days, I don’t need to announce my direction. I simply move and let my actions speak with more authority than any words ever could.

The Scholar I Always Was

I was homeschooled inside a high-control religious community. I don't have a high school diploma. My education has gaps in it that frequently surface, things most people learned at sixteen that I am still filling in. That is where I started. It took time to find my feet — more than it would have taken someone who started from a more usual place. But I was committed to finding my way back to what I actually wanted, rather than what I had been instructed.

What other people thought about my journey was often confusion. They rarely said anything directly. The doubt showed up in the way it usually does: the quiet questions, the raised eyebrows, the slow retreat of people who had decided without telling me that I was making the wrong choices. I got good at reading the retreat.

I kept going anyway.

When I stepped into graduate-level history, the reaction around me was not celebration. It was confusion. The message didn't need to be spoken out loud. It was in the silence, in the careful way people asked what I was planning to do with it, in the implication running under every polite question that curiosity is only respectable when it leads somewhere capitalism approves of.

I ignored that. Not without noticing it. I noticed it. But I didn't allow it to become the deciding factor.

I love being a scholar. I love the discipline of it, the reading, the questions, the slow accumulation of patterns across centuries of human experience. I love the way history sharpens how I understand power, and the way it nourishes something in me that nothing else quite reaches. Pursuing an MSc in history at the University of Edinburgh, later in life than most, after starting from further back than most, is not something I need to justify. It is the most honest thing I have done with my intellectual life.

Giving myself permission to do it anyway — to refuse the argument that curiosity must earn its keep — was its own form of resistance. Not against any single person. Against the idea itself.

Leaving a Life I Loved

When I left the United States, I was not leaving a life I hated. I was not escaping a life that had gone wrong. I had a home I loved, a garden that was flourishing, animals who were family, a community that held me. I had built something real, and it was the first time in my life I felt at home.

I left because I could see what was coming. My studies had given me a framework for reading patterns of conflict, and what I was reading was concerning. My intuition, sharpened by a lifetime of having to navigate situations other people couldn't see clearly until it was too late, told me the same thing. The country I loved was changing in ways that would eventually cost me more to stay for than to leave.

That is not a simple feeling to sit with. Leaving somewhere you love, before it has technically failed you, because you can see far enough ahead to know it will — that is its own particular grief. There is no clean story to tell about it. I wasn't fleeing. I was choosing to lose something I loved on my own terms, rather than waiting for it to be taken.

I was grieving through foresight. I loved my life there enough to refuse denial as the price of keeping it.

I still grieve it. That is not the same as regretting it.

What Following Your Own Voice Actually Costs

None of this has been free. I want to be clear about that, because life doesn't arrive at a tidy resolution.

The education took longer and cost more because there was more turbulence. Leaving the U.S. cost me a garden, pets, forests, a community, a home. The choices that felt most like mine were usually the ones other people understood least, and the retreat of people who didn't understand was sometimes lonely in ways I hadn't anticipated.

What I have learned, slowly and at some cost, is that following your own voice is not something you do once. It is something you practice. And the practice does not get easier exactly; it gets more familiar. You learn to recognize what it sounds like when it's actually yours, rather than when it's performing for an audience that isn't paying attention anyway.

My voice is not quieter now than it used to be. It is less interested in being heard. The arguments I used to make out loud — for the choices I was making, for the life I was building, for the right to want what I wanted — I no longer make in the same way. Not because I stopped believing them. Because the choices make the argument for me. My actions got bigger. The need for the words got smaller.

I follow my own voice. I always have, even when it cost me something to do it. The difference now is that I no longer need anyone else to agree that it is worth following.