I have the freedom to create any future I want.

Almost everyone overestimates how much of their life is fixed. Ask a person to list the things that genuinely cannot move — the caring arrangement, the visa, the mortgage — and the list is usually shorter than the feeling of being stuck suggests.

The rest was decided once, years ago, under different conditions, and has been renewing itself quietly ever since because nobody went back to look at it.

Write out the real fixed points sometime. Not to conclude you are free of them; some are immovable and heavy. But whatever is not on that list has been behaving like a constraint without ever having been one.