A friend of mine texted me from Portugal the other day, where she and her husband have been living for a stretch now. We got to talking about freedom. Real freedom, not the kind from a history book – a slave set free, walking out from under something that never had any right to hold them in the first place, or a trap springing open and something wild bounding back into the woods. We know that freedom. We can picture it.
We were after a different kind: freedom from something you can’t see, from what people think of you.
She was typing fast, chasing the thought before it got away from her, and what landed on my screen was this: “free from the opinion of otters.”
I read it twice and laughed out loud. Classic. She meant others – autocorrect, thumbs, the usual suspects. But I couldn’t let it go, because “the opinion of otters” might be the truest typo I’ve ever seen.
What exactly is an otter’s opinion of you worth?
If you spend enough time on the bay side of a barrier island, you may have crossed paths with a few, lurking among the mangroves. They’re curious, mostly indifferent, occasionally offended if you get between them and a meal. They do not sit in committee about your life choices. They do not gather on a rock to whisper about the way you part your hair, or the career you chose, or the fact that you left your old life behind to freedive for sand dollars. An otter has zero opinion about your income, your marriage, your faith. An otter’s opinion of you does not exist.
Her slip landed on something true. We’ve traded the real captors, the chain-and-cage kind, for an audience we built ourselves. Nobody put those seats there but us. We set up the stage and filled the house with people who never bought a ticket, people who, if you actually stopped and asked them, would tell you they hadn’t thought about us in weeks. Most of the seats are empty. We’re the only one performing.
I know a few people who’ve slipped that leash. You know them too. They wear the wrong shoes with total confidence, take the job nobody understands, love loudly in a culture that prefers cool, and show up to church or the beach or the boardroom exactly as they are, letting the rest of the room adjust. They’re not reckless, either – they notice the room, they just don’t let it steer them. They’ve stopped outsourcing their worth to people who never earned a say in it.
Conformity can be a stranglehold – slow, polite, socially acceptable, and it’ll choke the individuality clean out of you if you let it. It doesn’t come at you with chains. It comes with a raised eyebrow, or a “that’s different,” said in just the right tone. Most of us bow to it without ever being asked to bow. We hand our freedom over to otters, creatures who could not care less.
Out there past the sandbar most evenings, watching the light go copper on the water, here’s where I’ve landed: opinions are the great taker of captives, but only the ones we let put a collar on us. The rest is just noise on a rock somewhere, mumbling to itself.
