Autonomy

Driving to work this morning, I was ruminating on various conscious and subconscious obsessions of mine during childhood/young adulthood. A major one was autonomy. That is, the ability to move free in the world. The object that triggered this memory was seeing a driver education car passing in the other lane. Getting a driver's license was a major way to gain autonomy. But my yearning for a semblance of autonomy manifested itself in even more abstract ways than this. For example, I remember being obsessed with obtaining lead figures (i.e. miniature figures representing characters/monsters, but we only ever called them "lead figures"; they were made of lead) during my early D&D playing days. Not obtaining a huge collection of them. Just having them at all. This allowed a representation of my characters in D&D playing space. Also, this creeped into my love of arcade video games. In a video game, a representation of you could move freely, controlled by you. The most basic example that typically springs to my mind is the ship in the Asteroids game, which could move anywhere on the board using some basic (but somewhat difficult to master) controls. I remember these yearnings/images of autnomy even invading my dreams at the time. Now that I am a more or less fully autonomous adult, and have been for some time, it's curious to remember those old feelings. Adult autonomy came so gradually, that these feelings of limitation and weakness seemed to have disappeared without my really noticing that they had gone.