The Long Game. Freedom looks like this | by Naghma Rahman | Women Write | Nov, 2025

They say freedom makes noise — in revolutions, in speeches, in stadiums that roar.
But sometimes, it’s the silence after the cheer that tells the real story.

Back in 2022, someone at work offered me family passes for a cricket match. “Women’s cricket,” they said.
That was all the context I needed. Their tone carried the disinterest.
And mine matched it.

I smiled, declined, and moved on — the kind of silence that reveals more than you intend to know about yourself. Whether it was bias or borrowed apathy, I couldn’t tell. All I know now is that my silence that day said more than I’d like to admit.

Maybe freedom, back then, would have been just that — saying yes. Going anyway. Wanting to, or not wanting to. But deciding for myself.

But I didn’t. I let someone else’s disinterest become my own. That’s the quietest kind of captivity — when your choices start echoing the crowd’s instead of your conscience.

It’s strange, the things we internalize without realizing.
Whose stories we think are worth watching.
Whose victories we assume won’t matter.

Three years later, on a November night in 2025, I was glued to the screen as India’s women lifted the World Cup under the DY Patil lights.
But what they really lifted was something deeper — a kind of freedom you can’t measure in runs or wickets.

Freedom that looks like a team walking back sunburnt and certain, having undone years of “almosts” and “maybe next times,” of applause that came too little, too late.

And sometimes, it arrives, not with a roar, but with a deep exhale. A stillness that no longer flinches.

Women, across fields, know this rhythm well. We play our own long games, on uneven pitches, under uncertain lights, with crowds that cheer a little too late. We play knowing the rules weren’t written for us.
And yet, we play anyway.

Because for years, freedom was a flag someone else waved on our behalf.
Now, it looks different. It looks like showing up with your full voice in a room that once demanded you shrink.

It is choosing peace over proving a point.
It’s that half-second pause between reaction and response,that decision to choose calm over being right.

Maybe, like me, you once thought being free meant breaking away,
from control, from expectations, from systems.
But the real prison was never out there.
It lived inside your mind.

Because maybe freedom isn’t something you’re handed.
Maybe it’s something you earn, ball by ball, choice by choice, decade by decade.

And when it finally arrives, it doesn’t roar.
It smiles.
It hands you the bat.
And says,
“Go on. Your turn.”