I recently attended a fetish oriented meet and greet and met a person who described herself as a hippie dippy free spirit, and ever since then the concept of free spiritedness has been on my mind. I've often been criticized for a stubborn insistence on doing things the way I want to do them; for instance, only entering and exiting buildings through the door on the right, or bringing a book with me wherever I go to read if I get bored. (Interesting observation: no one bats an eye if you stare at your phone in a social setting, but start reading a book and people find it deeply strange.) When people criticize me, what they most often call me is rigid or inflexible, yet it seems to me that my desire to act in a way that pleases should, in all fairness, be called free spirited. After all, what am I doing if not behaving as my heart demands, regardless of social pressure? I bristle at the notion that I am not free spirited because I like schedules and order and, God forbid, responsibility, because I like to stay in one place and do one job rather than travel or experience novelty for it's own sake. Perhaps it's time to separate the hippie dippy from the free spirit, since it seems to me that they are distinct and discrete ideas that are not necessarily related to one another.
