Of Cages and Escape
It is common practice for humans to get involved in things that have nothing to do with them as it is also common for humans to distance themselves from things that have everything to do with them.
In the mesh of my neural networks sometimes the two overlap and I can’t say for certain whether something is about me or someone else. Logic requires us to have reasons and explanations for why we took a certain course of action. Cliche statements like, “I didn’t have a choice, I just got caught up in it, it was probably peer pressure or it has everything to do with my wounds from childhood that never healed and so on.”
Whatever it may be, sometimes we give reasons for our actions and other times we take action for our reasons, some of which we can’t share out loud not even to ourselves.
Reality can be quite harsh and hard to deal with at times and being human, we have created many mechanisms that allow us some escape, most of them harmful in their own right.
What do you turn to when your cage seems to be getting smaller and you can’t move freely anymore? What do you turn to when your shackles hold you back from going further than you would like?
Do you drown yourself in soulful soothing music? Do you set fire to your insides and get that extra boost of Nicotine? Perhaps you get on your knees and pray to whatever god you believe in. Do you excite and then numb your senses with alcohol? Do you lose yourself in a good book or maybe do you seek the comfort or warmth in someone else’s arms and skin? So many ways to escape the cages and shackles of pain in its many forms.
Someone somewhere is putting themselves through physical pain in order to escape emotional pain. Punching walls, kicking stones and cutting with razors trying to bleed out the pain as if it lives in blood.
Changing your outward appearance, getting new clothes, moving to a new place, making new friends and yet at the core of it , you’re still the same person. Still afraid, still angry, still unfulfilled, still a failure, a fraud, an outsider and still looking for ways to escape to breakfree. To forget the could-have-beens and focus on that what-is.
Every day even without knowing you think about everything you could be, the life you could lead if you didn’t have all the problems that tie you down and keep you moving around in your cage.
Take time to think about what you do to escape and ask yourself if it enough or perhaps your cage and shackles are made of candy and you can just eat them.
