first measure of freedom In this discussion of Mitchel Becker and Boaz Shalgi's paper “On Being, Disappearing, and Becoming: A Journey of Surrender,” I briefly discuss the context of the idea of negation and the negative in psychoanalytic thinking, and suggest the need for a more nuanced and specific language to distinguish the multiple kinds of being and not-being the authors invoke. I suggest, for example, that there are constitutive kinds of negation and traumatic ones. I resonate with the authors’ emphasis on flows and movement and the necessity of tolerating nothingness in the process of change.