Now, I’m not sure if you’ve been looking around in the interpipe or if you’ve read any local periodicals, but a few days ago there was this day people call the Fourth of July. Independence Day. You heard it here first. You’re welcome.

Most years, the holiday represents just me getting a day off from work; which ain’t half bad. As I am one to do, I took a good amount of time over this extended weekend to really think about things and have yet another deep dive into my emotions and thoughts. It’s a vast, endless ocean where the deeper I go the more pressure and separation from the surface and the world at large I feel. I dove in pretty hard this weekend.

In my introspection, I thought back to 1776. I imagine a group of men and women, living in the British colonies and finding themselves increasingly irritated by the pressures of a distant government. Feeling like their own hard work is not really benefiting them, and that life would be better if they could live free of Britain’s influence.

These people had to know what they were signing up for when they decided to declare their independence, right? They knew, more than most, about the might of Britain and what effectively going to war with them would mean. These people could have probably continued to live on under British rule, and even felt instances of happy and normalcy for it. I’m no historian, but life probably wouldn’t have been that bad.

I’d imagine it’d have been better than going to war for freedom, and yet they bravely chose the hard way in pursuit of happiness and freedom.

Something one of the best people I will ever know tells me often enough to never settle. That that’s not how we roll. It’s a doctrine I’m a firm believer in, and yet in retrospect I can see instances where I waivered and accepted less than what I felt I deserved or was fair. I didn’t declare my independence.

And what does that even get you? The two options I can think of or have experienced are that I make some concession in some attempt to play the ‘long game’ and I end up without what I was playing for anyway. So then I feel like a jackass for the concession on top of whatever feelings come out of not getting what I was after, which is something depression loves to prattle on about.

Or I actually get what I want, but it feels a little hollow; like it came at an unexpectedly great cost. Am I really the person I strive to be if I sacrifice core parts of myself in some bid to bargain for something? Something I’ve told a friend of mine is that if you try to force a square peg in a round hole with enough force, it’ll go in there. But some parts of the peg are either shaved off or bent in irreparable ways. And that round hole then becomes a point of resentment than whatever you perceived it to be.

It’s a fool’s errand, basically. I’ve found myself too often on that sort of errand lately across a different range of topics. And I do believe the proverbial buck as stopped as far as all that goes.

Give me liberty or give me death. This is not the battlecry of a people that are cool with 60% happiness. Now, I don’t write this to suggest I’ve somehow adopted this rigid, inflexible mindset where I expect the world to bend to my will. Because I don’t feel that way.

But what I am saying is that there is a baseline of principles and ideals that serve as the foundation to the kind of life I want to have, and I’m no longer entertaining things that undermine them.

I’d rather walk away with nothing and stay true to who I am than to become something I’m not to settle for part of something.

For the land of the free, and the home of the brave.