Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

Let me tell you something about freedom, that nobody puts in the books.

It is not what they gave you.
It is not what they withheld.
It has nothing to do with their applause,
their honors,
their careful nod of approval
across a room that was never built for you.

You already know this.
Some part of you
has always known this.

The ones who survived —
and I mean really survived,
not just the body but the self,
the deep and irreducible self —
they carried something inside them
that circumstance could not touch.
Not because they were unafraid.
But because they had found
the thing underneath the fear.

A purpose.
Quiet as a heartbeat.
Steady as memory.

Seek that first.
Before anything else.
Before you go looking
for what the world is willing
to offer you on its own terms.

Seek the thing that is yours.
That was always yours.
And everything you need —
the peace,
the rest,
the sense of having finally
come home to yourself —
it will come.

It will come.

But you cannot get there
holding on to everything.

Freedom costs something.
It always has.
You have to lay something down.
Walk away from something
you thought you could not live without.

That is the surrender.
That is the door.

And on the other side of it —
not paradise,
not the absence of struggle —
but something rarer.

Yourself.
Whole.
Uncaged.
Finally.

Welcome to the start of our sustainable livelihoods movement, our healthier futures one too, our open door…If you know anything about me, you would know that sustainable marketplaces for health is a dream that I will give up everything for. The grant failed in 2015. Reviewers thought it was ambitious. We are rewriting it, 11 years later our way, and through our open door. As noted by Charne Newman, “true value isn’t determined by institutions. It’s determined by us, by what we deem worth preserving, worth experiencing, worth making.” The heritage we preserve, those we experience, and those we make with our hands are worth fighting for. Culture is capital. It is also health and in a place where 1 in 2 individuals, women in particularly are already living within, making livelihoods too, we might as well infuse our health work inside. So we begin, join us…Apply here