We build these cages around ourselves because we have to do it. We need shelter. We need basic structure and security. Cages are necessary and good. But this is the gut-punch of life: those cages can become overgrown. Overgrown with resentment, with unexpressed disappointments, with repressed dreams, with opportunities never even entertained. Material manifestations of emotional waste.
Life’s choices are often binary. We take the job or we don’t. We leave the marriage or we don’t. We have kids or we don’t. It’s not the result that can alter our lives. Instead the real power comes in making those choices honestly and openly. I’m afraid this is the part people miss. The value of the process.
It doesn’t really matter if you stay or go, if you do or don’t. It matters whether you are willing to get really still to think about it. It matters whether you are willing to be painfully honest about the good and the bad sides of both options. It matters that you SAY IT ALL. Out loud. To another human being. Instead we believe we weigh it in our mind. We think we already know.
My mother would be so disappointed
I don’t have a right to walk away
My sister needs me to be this way
My kids will be ruined
My family will suffer with less
My life is good
So many people would want the things I have
This is what I wanted (ok, but what do you want now?)
It’s overwhelming, I know. We can start by exploring the sometimes subtle differences between suffocation and dissatisfaction. One can be cured with a massive gulp of fresh air and gratitude. The other is holding you back. It is causing long-term damage. If you are dissatisfied, smaller changes can make a big difference. If you are suffocating, out is the only way. There is no security in a house that’s burning down.
Don’t stay out of fear of what’s outside.
Don’t run away either.
Just because you can see the door doesn’t mean you should bolt without looking back.
I’ve been in the place where it feels horrible. Where you all of a sudden know that your life is going to be completely different when you walk out that door. But I left, and I survived and I made myself a promise. I would never get there again. So everything that makes me comfortable? I periodically dismantle it. I take my life apart to inspect it for cracks and leaks. I make sure it’s all still working. And as I reassemble it, I look at each piece and say do I still need this?
I choose my life. I choose my husband all the time. I choose my job all the time. I choose my kids all the time — I look at them and say what can I do to help them become this or that, and I look at myself and say how can I accept them more exactly as they are?
This work is not for the faint of heart. To say it can be really really hard is an understatement. But when I broke free of the expectations that set me on auto-pilot, I vowed to build a life, and to break it down.
This is my reward for all those hard times: I will never, ever, ever be in a cage.
And freedom is more beautiful and exhilarating and gratifying than all of that pain.
I know not everybody gets a new life. It takes courage to start over again. It takes time to make it feel worth it. Not everyone even finds the door. But if you see it, and you can promise you will build it up, break it down, build it up, then you deserve to try.
But am I the cage or am I the bird?
In the cage it feels like everything is broken and everything needs to be fixed. Even things that truly aren’t broken, but maybe are simply mid-assembly. In the cage, doing this work sounds exhausting and horrible. Once you are free you realize that so many times NOTHING needs to be fixed. You only need to take it all apart to see that you are not the cage, even though you may have come to identify with it so much that you can’t see the bars. You are not the cage. You are the bird.
“You can fly away too, that’s on you.”
*That last line in quotations is from the Ingrid Michaelson song, Build It Up, which was written for the finale of Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu. The themes in this essay were inspired by that episode, and Kate and I explore them on our recap episode, but you don’t have to have watched or listened to relate to these ideas.