I thought I’d share this little poem by Isaiah Berlin with you:

I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind.

I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men, or act of will.

I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside.

I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave, incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them.

~Isaiah Berlin