We were taught many duties.
Be responsible. Be present. Keep your word. Take care of the people you love. Answer for your choices.
And rightly so.
Duties support us.
But a life made only of duties becomes rigid.
Rights are the space that still allows us to breathe, change direction and remain alive.
The problem does not begin when we have duties.
It begins when we forget that we also have rights.
The right to change our mind. To stop wanting what we once wanted. To pause. Not to be strong all the time. To disappoint somebody without betraying them. To carry the traces of what we have lived without being condemned to remain the person we were then.
The duty not to disappoint
Some duties are never handed to us in writing. They do not appear in contracts and they never expire, yet they can accompany us for a lifetime.
One of them is the duty not to disappoint.
Repeated often enough, comparison stops being comparison.
It becomes a measure.
And if that measure teaches you that you are worth little — or nothing — you can begin to believe it.
I believed it for years.
When you think you must prove your worth, many choices become evidence: work, success, body, home, relationships.
It becomes a trial we keep conducting long after the prosecution has left the room.
Proof that was never for them
One of the first cracks in that belief came when I opened a wine bar.
I had no previous experience giving me permission to think: I know how to do this.
I had to learn. Study. Work. Make mistakes. Begin again.
The important thing was not proving to other people that I could succeed.
It was discovering that I could trust myself.
Then came something less spectacular: living alone, with little money, without asking, and building a dignified life anyway.
Success is not always reaching higher.
Sometimes it is simply discovering: I can stand on my own feet.
The right to stop
For years I tried to prove that I was not worth zero.
Eventually the question changed.
Not: how do I prove how much I am worth?
But: why should I still have to prove it?
I do not have to prove anything to anyone anymore.
And that, more than any achievement, has been the real victory.
Perhaps this is one of the rights we forget most easily:
the right to stop competing.
The right to lower the guard
There is another silent duty: the duty to be permanently self-sufficient.
Learning to stand on our own feet matters. But it should not become an obligation never to lean.
There is no age limit for wanting to feel protected. I do not mean being rescued, supported financially or directed. I mean the very simple calm that can exist inside an embrace: for a few minutes, somebody else can think about me.
The right to protect ourselves.
And, when it is possible, the right to lower the guard.
Being an adult does not mean we must always be the person holding everything together.
Continue with: Still Capable of Love →
The right to change what we are looking for
We may have wanted lightness and begin to want intimacy. We may have looked for sex and realise that today we would like somebody to stay. We may also move in the opposite direction.
We do not have to remain loyal to an earlier version of our desires simply to appear consistent.
We have the right to change. Including what we ask of love.
The difficult part comes next: saying we want depth also means giving people enough time to become more than a profile.
Continue with: We’re Afraid of Wasting Time →
This story is not finished
The right to… will grow.
The right to change. Not to disown who we were. To inhabit our body. To change a dream. To become without already having a life CV to present.
Some pages will be added. Others rewritten. A few may disappear.
We have the right to change.
These pages do too.