Freedom and Play

Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?

Play is something I’ve struggled to connect to for the past few years and I feel like I’ve finally started having it again.

I’ve come to realize play is something that can effectively be had once you are in a position of safety. When safety is absent you’ll try to attach yourself to anything that had made you feel safe before, that can be seen through escapism or always returning to specific items or something along those lines.

When my living circumstances weren’t the best I found escape and a new sense of safety through my fitness. Something so multifaceted for me, it had been the bedrock for my discipline and cultivation for my independence but also where I learned to find safety within my body again.

As I’ve come to grow and ebb and flow into the person I am now, I’ve found myself being a lot more playful. I really enjoy it, it feels like a part of me that has had to wait at the sidelines for years and years, generationally so.

A couple days ago I got pizza for the house. It was our dinner to be split between my Grandfather, my uncle, and I.

I got the box and what not and brought it home, I ate my slices and went back to grinding on OSU I’ve been addicted to playing Monster by Reol (it’s such a good song).

But my grandfather leaves to go do something and my uncle comes back from work and we chat for a bit. Wandering over to the kitchen we see there are 3 pizza crusts still on the table. My uncle exclaims that this is bougie behavior, but I thought it was adorable and really kiddish.

My grandfather is a really stoic individual. He doesn’t say I love you or even express any emotion for the most part. Even when my grandmother asks he’ll be silent or circle around it getting increasingly annoyed. Then my grandmother will laugh and then ask me to say the three magic words, which I do without fail.

Recently I asked him if he was happy.

He has retired recently and has been at home a lot more, he sits in silence or doomscrolls or watches whatever soccer match is going on. We’ve noticed he’s more irritable for the most part.

So when I was tipsy after sipping on 3 cans of some Voodoo Rangers I took it upon myself to ask.

We don’t talk really. I asked him once if he loved me but only ever managed to get out an ‘of course I do’ but never the actual words.

He told me of course I’m happy I can do anything I want. Materially the world is still at his finger tips I suppose.

But he’s sick, he spoke of how it was easier to be lost in the process of working than it was to enjoy the ease that came with the fruits of his labor.

Then I asked what he viewed me as. Truthfully I was unsure if I really thought if he was unhappy or if I was projecting on to him.

I had been feeling so down and isolated recently. I was searching for connection. Asking him what he thought of me was uncomfortable, I hate thinking about how I’m perceived let alone asking about it. But I did.

He told me that he saw me as a hard worker and a success, but he’s worried about my future. Life isn’t the same as when he came to the U.S.

He was able to come to the U.S. speaking broken english, get soccer scholarships, and get his degree, all almost debt free. In his words “They paid me to go to school”.

I don’t know why but when he was telling me that tears started to swell in my eyes where the reality of my world had really set it. I am in debt and the economic chains tighten around my neck everyday.

Truthfully I broke down in front of him, hearing that and then thinking about how I need to start paying my student loans this month on top of my other bills just made things feel so soul crushing.

I have worked so hard to carve out my freedom and self expression in spite of the hardships present before me and yet something else has come for my safety.

It’s hard for me to play, I’ve been trying to reconnect slowly throughout all of 2025. Searching for peace in my own world here or there but it was never enough, anxiety was always screaming at the back of my head that I needed to keep working before I could rest. My grandfather has the same issue.

At the start of December I hurt my back. It hurt to walk, to sit, to wake up. I had to abandon the gym for a bit I had overworked myself. I had to let all parts of me rest a little.

My mind had time to breathe again. The second half of 2025 went by so fast, I was engulfed by a world of work I had no time to breathe.

I didn’t know what to do with all this extra time. I got started by organizing more things and playing with my spreadsheets in some new ways which I always love. But I grew tired of that too, there’s only so much work to be done in one day.

The days went by, a project would be started and completed, started out on pause and then returned to, and I found myself question freedom once again.

Slavery is something that always stays on my mind, I feel that I had to become a slave to my dreams to find the freedom I wanted.

I always knew freedom came at a cost but I never thought about what it could be.

In the American context freedom is something that is sold to you. Freedom of autonomy, choice, and increasingly speech. But the bedrock of what makes freedom meaningful is safety.

There’s no real point to any of your freedom if you’re not safe, you’ll never be able to express yourself to the fullest without the safety.

Time and time again I had found myself creating out of this need for self expression. Trying to churn the insecurity and lack of safety I felt within my own mind into something new, something that I could go deeper with and say that, I am safe to be me.

When I had finally run out of things to do I would return to what had always comforted me in the past. Games and anime!

I like anime but lately my tastes have changed, I used to love the normal shonen stuff that is always primarily marketed for teenage boys but I’ve really been enjoying my romcoms lately. The last one I saw was this series Ranma 1/2 about these teens put into an arranged marriage but the twist is that the groom can turn into a girl when water is splashed on them, and hijinks ensues.

Watching this has been a nice departure from what my everyday sometimes feels filled with, the series is playful and is overall easy on my mind. It’s like when I know I can finally sit down and watch that I have really done all I need to.

But playing games is another story, when I play games I am a cortisol addict. I used to play a lot of shooters and pvp games but I’ve grown jaded of all that. I don’t care about being the best anymore, I don’t have the time or effort to be bothered at getting good anymore. Except in OSU. Something about OSU just satisfies my head even when I’m struggling in there. I may have hit my plateau but it’s fun. Each song stresses me out in its own way and I just want to keep doing better. It’s tooo addicting.

But overall in this time of rest I’ve been in I’ve really been trying to have more fun outside of having a sly mouth. I’ve been forcing my self to do less in this last week of 2025 and think about all I’ve done and how it’s okay to relax.

So I did!

Today January 1st (now Jan2 at the time of writing) is the first time in years I have done NOTHING.

I woke up and drank a bottle of champagne and doom scrolled on tiktok until 3pm! And then right after I watched YouTube for a bit and then started PLURIBUS.

I just finished it and was really good and got my mind thinking about freedoms and happiness and all that good stuff since that is what my mind is ALL about with EVERYTHING I’m doing right now.

The last thing my Grandfather said to me in our chat about happiness is that he is not a slave.

I think of that now and how I’ve felt a slave to myself and today has been my day of rebellion!

But what does this all have to do with fun and play you may ask, everything!!

To have fun is to be free. To play is to be free.

Beyond safety, to exude playfulness means one’s identity feels safe. In my day to day playfulness has come to look like rest, snarky remarks based on some word play, and