“Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said. Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”
It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.
“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”
“Negative liberty,” he said, “is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action.”
He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.
From the Internet I learned about the cancer that had been discovered on Bob Marley’s foot. I also learned that Marley had been a Rastafarian, and that Rastafari believe in a “whole body,” which is why he had refused surgery to amputate the toe. Four years later, at age thirty-six, he died.
Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.
I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.