reading room
I Don't Owe My Time To Anyone
I don’t owe my time to anyone. Not the bells that split the morning like ritual, not the collar biting at my neck like penance, not the white walls that smell of bleach and silence, not the corridor clocks that sermonise in seconds, counting out my youth in fluorescent faith. The hum of lights tunnels through thought, And every tick feels like confession.
They say we earn our freedom by degrees. GCSEs: a fraction of choice. A Levels: a little more. Like believers reward for obedience. As if liberty were salvation, not birthright.
I do not blame the hands that hold the chalk, or the mouths that repeat the rules. They are just voices of another creed, caught in the same echoing vaults of command. It is the architects I name, the ones who built the pulpit and called it a nation’s future.
I know what they say they hoped for: structure to hold us steady, teams to teach us kindness, clubs to shape us into citizens— and yes, I see the comfort in it. But the structure becomes cage when the rhythm of your mind does not match the ringing of their bells. When every lesson is a mask tightened over breath and name. When the hours that could be music, or thought, or stillness, are traded for exhaustion in the name of order. And still, they ask for more— extracurricular, that sanctified word, as if the hours already taken were not devotion enough, as if the body owed them after school, too.
Children are clothed in obedience, then praised for “maturity” when they kneel to thank you for a longer leash. You steal our mornings and call it devotion, drain our wonder and call it focus, measure our hours and call it grace.
You say this is structure. I say this is empire rebuilt. You say this is education. I say this is worship mistaken for wisdom.
Fuck your structure.
I am not your disciple.
Do you hear yourselves? The factory called it progress. The priest called it salvation. The master called it order. You call it school. The shape of power never changes, only its vocabulary.
And still, I do not hate those beside me in the rows. Their eyes flicker like mine once did. They are weary dreamers too, hoping for approval they’ll never keep. It is not their faith I resist, but the quiet hunger that names itself virtue.
My time is not a tithe. My curiosity is not your scripture. My breath is not the property of sermons.
I will not thank you for the right to exist. I will not apologise for walking out. Yet I wish peace on those still kneeling, not knowing the door was never locked.
I learn as the rebels learned, from the wind, from hunger, from the stars. Through cracks in the stained glass, from the questions you forbid. From the laughter that slipped through the halls when no one was watching.
Your classrooms are shrines painted in pastel and praise. Your freedom is a sermon. Your notion of maturity, a myth.
Freedom never arrives in instalments. It was mine before your rules, and mine again now that I’ve stopped asking.
I don’t owe my time to anyone.
The clock keeps ticking. I walk past it— unowned.
— Lilith