NIGHT OWL
A lot of people have asked me what I learned most during the time I decided to study in London. My answer has surprised some of them. It was not a new theory, a prestigious institution, or even the thrill of living in a global city. It was freedom.
Not the grand, abstract kind we often invoke in speeches and essays. I mean a quieter, more intimate freedom: the freedom to free yourself from the baggage of societal expectation. The freedom to stop performing a version of yourself that others find acceptable. The freedom to pursue your work, your research, and your questions on your own terms, by your own methodology, with the dignity to reason, to disagree, and to be taken seriously.
As a woman who has led a career, I have long understood that success is rarely just about competence. It is also about navigation.
You learn how to read a room before you enter it. You learn when to speak with conviction and when to soften your voice so your certainty does not threaten anyone. You learn that ambition in a woman is often admired only when it is dressed as sacrifice, humility, or service. Even when you are accomplished, there is a subtle but constant pressure to remain palatable.
That is why freedom felt so profound to me in London. It was different to see it, to feel it, to inhabit it. For perhaps the first time in a long time, I felt released from the burden of explanation. I was not being measured against a script of what a woman at my stage in life ought to want, ought to prioritize, ought to become. I was simply allowed to think.
That may sound ordinary, but it is not. For many women, the right to think freely is still negotiated, not granted. We are encouraged to achieve, certainly, but often within approved boundaries. Be accomplished, but not intimidating. Be opinionated, but not difficult. Be independent, but not so independent that you become unreadable to the world around you. Freedom, then, is not merely the ability to move. It is the ability to exist without being constantly interpreted.
In London, I experienced the joy of intellectual space. I could pursue my research not as a performance, but as a practice. I could follow a question where it led, rather than where convention suggested it should go. I could test my own methodology, refine my own arguments, and enter into discourse with the confidence that rigorous reasoning was enough. That dignity matters. To be able to reason without apology is one of the purest forms of freedom I have known.
What I discovered is that freedom is not irresponsibility, nor is it rebellion for its own sake. It is clarity. It is the moment you realize that a life can be authored, not inherited. It is choosing what to carry and what to set down. It is understanding that expectations, however deeply rooted, are not destiny.
As women, many of us spend years becoming legible to others: reliable, respectable, admirable. Freedom begins when we become legible to ourselves. When we can say, without guilt, this is what I think, this is what I value, this is the work I want to do, and this is the life I want to build.
That is what London gave me. Not a new identity, but permission to return to my own mind. And once you have felt that kind of freedom, it becomes impossible to settle for anything less.
