Flying on Your Own

Independence as a word itself is so impactful and liberating, that everyone wants to experience it in their life. We live in an independent country but somewhere everyone is still fighting a battle to be personally independent in terms of their dependency on family, friends, work or some other addiction. Everyone wants to be a free bird, having just the right amount of dependency but at the end of the day they want to experience to fly on their own; the intent is not to fly alone but to fly on their own.

When we are growing up, that is the time we have the major dependency on everything possible. But as we grow then we want to have “our own space”. We all want to come over the dependency we needed/loved while growing up. I think it is more because earlier we are not figuring out or thinking about our own identity but as we grow we have a perception about our self, we have our “personal identity” and to sustain this identity we need to fly (be independent) so that everyone can see that we are capable of flying on our own.

Flying on our own has its own high; the feeling of independence is just so “feel-good-about-yourself” feeling. It is nice to know we can do things on our own and to also let people know we are capable of doing things on our own. People who have always been dependent (not being judgemental about anyone), but for them to experience this feeling is very essential. It is more about knowing you more and just not knowing others or knowing you through others. It is all about exploring the heights u can fly on your own. Being dependent may be a very secured feeling but in process it is more of losing yourself (largely). As we hear and say it is all about “balanced life”; I think we all need to balance out with being independent and dependent.

The most common situation that comes to my mind about fighting for independence is between parents and children. Of course, children grow and then they are no more children and they have turned into young adults and adults need their “own space”. But parents remain parents and children would remain their children no matter how young or old adults they become. We all know that it is very difficult to let go, it takes lot of time to let go off things and here we are expecting parents to let go off their children so that they can have their “own space”. I mean I am sure it is difficult for them and of all the stories they hear as to “uske saath yeh hua” (this is what happened to him/her, it makes it all the more difficult for them to let go. When people can’t let go of their bf/gf/ex’s; here we are expecting parents to let go off their children.Moreover, we need to develop some trust and give some time to actually have our own space , we cannot just have all of it at one time.

I think this generation has lot of peer pressure and the size of our “own space” depends more on how much space their peers have. Also, this generation gives too much importance to being independent at a very early stage. But I have seen, eventually you get independent. The young generation define independence as being able to drink, party late night, not ask too many questions, not intrude in their so called personal life etc. But let’s take a step back and ask- Is this really what independence is all about? Are these things really giving you your personal identity or they or more like defining your choices?

Well, for me independence is being able to do my things on my own, to earn a living for myself and for those connected to me and also about making others a part of my independent life so that they don’t have to let go of me and I don’t have to fight for my independence . We don’t fight for independence ,we make ourselves so capable enough for others to know that we are independent.