We are prisoners in our bodies, in our thoughts, in our existence. We are doomed to repeatedly create images to fit our changing, developing, evolving values and measurements. Free to evolve and grow through an acknowledgement of the injury, the pain, and changes as an existential experience. Free to reinvent and be who we are.

The released prisoner holds an identity that has been drained out of content. The mask that we used to put on from time to time is by now an empty shell. A relic of a fallen empire. The statue still stands, the empire does not. The image we created helps us to hide, to shelter, helps us to avoid feelings, fears, and the shame of exposure. As a monumental act of aggrandizing, the “self” holds the promise to control the future: What was, will continue to be.

But now the time has come for a reckoning with the past. The mold becomes too constricting. We grow, need, and want to recreate ourselves. With all the pain, successes, and the prices we had to pay for them – with the baggage we accumulated through life. To return to life from within the difference. To revisit what can never be repeated. To stand as if for the first time in front of a second chance.

Through the cracks in the façade, through the growing pains – through empathy – we wish to see life in a new way. Searching our way, not as absolute beginners, not as isolated individuals, but as people with experience. Holding the memory of what is no longer relevant. Holding the memory as a mechanism of disillusionment. As the presence of the difference reiterated in the identical. As a mending of broken trust – the trust in the image.

What is freedom?