October 18, 2020 There has always been a piece of me that screams to be free. I don’t know why, or where that desire is rooted, but from the time I was a small child, I have felt this ache. My birth mother was bipolar—not extreme, but enough that I never knew if she was going to be met with happiness, sadness, anger, or chaos. And whatever it was, it was often intense. I won’t go too deeply into that, but I never felt particularly free to be myself in those conditions. As a c