Cheryl on the Web

I grew up in the USA. Believe me, I have an idea of what freedom means. At least I thought I did, until I came to Europe. Then I began to miss a lot of the freedoms I had always taken for granted, like the freedom to drive a car; the freedom to go grocery shopping at any hour of the day or night; the freedom to leave the country or get married; the freedom to work where I want. And then I understood even more what freedom means.

I lost most of these freedoms only temporarily - and in some senses voluntarily, since I was a foreigner living under the rules of a host country - but the point here is not why I lost the freedoms but the effect it had on me. In particular, it wasn’t until this month that I exercised the one freedom I’d lost for over 5 years: the freedom to work where I want. And getting that freedom back has meant a lot to me. When I first came to Holland in 2001, I required a work permit. Getting it was a first class fight, of which the stress and the bureaucracy are not to be underestimated (it should be noted here, things have since changed for the better). Having finally gotten a work permit to work at a startup company, getting the permit changed to a new employer when the startup company couldn’t pay me anymore was four times more difficult and took me 12 months. Three years later, and three days after I got the Dutch government’s permission to work without a work permit, we decided to move to Germany. In Germany, ironically enough, I had the “freedom” to work anywhere I wanted - were it not for the fact that I didn’t speak any German… so I kept working for the company where I’d worked in Holland, full-time from a home office.

Two and a half years later, I’ve learned enough German to be able to get a job of my choosing. And I’ve switched jobs to a local German company. This is the first job in Europe that I chose not because the company could offer me a work permit but because I wanted to work there. It is amazing what a sense of freedom can do for one’s attitude and optimism in life. I have never worked 45 hours in a week with more pleasure. I have never commuted to work with more pleasure. It occurs to me every day: I am doing what I want to do in life; this is where I want to be; I have the power to achieve my goals.

I’ve struggled for enough years with the concept of freedom to realize now how important the distinction is between walls I can’t move and ones I can. And the more walls that can’t be moved, the more important it becomes to exercise freedoms that are there, as a sort of compensation. For instance, traveling is one of my ways to deal with day-to-day limitations that cause me stress. Looking at the last five years, the only reason I came out sane is that I went out of my way to enjoy freedoms I had, to distract myself from the ones I didn’t. And having made it through that period, I want to continue to remind myself to exercise the freedoms I have, to try not to take them for granted like I used to in the US, and not worry too much about the freedoms that aren’t there. I hope I can remind myself that, even though in America you’re taught that freedoms are a privilege everyone has a right to enjoy, sometimes you still have to work to enjoy a freedom - in the case of my new job, by learning a third language, sending countless job applications, and being prepared to sacrifice some demands. In the end, though, working to enjoy a freedom can be even more rewarding than taking it for granted.

Who was it again that said, Don’t try to change the things you can’t, but have the courage to change the things you can. That’s what I call freedom.