My Anywhere But Here Blog

When We Become the Ones Who Hold the Cage Door Closed

Sometimes the most difficult cages in life are not the ones built by circumstances or by other people.

Sometimes the cage exists quietly within our own thoughts.

There are moments in life when we begin to feel trapped.

Not always by circumstance, and not always by other people. Sometimes the feeling is quieter than that. It creeps in slowly — through doubt, through repeated words we have heard, through expectations we begin to carry long after they were first spoken.

And before we fully realize it, we find ourselves hesitating in places where once we might have moved forward.

Lately I have been reflecting on a difficult question:

Why do we sometimes become the ones who hold the cage door closed?

An example of this came to me recently. I have been wanting to take a trip to a true retreat hotel — somewhere I could simply hole up for two weeks and breathe.

But then the thoughts begin.

Travel can be such a hassle. And when you are already struggling just to live day to day, how does one even plan a big getaway?

It almost sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

But then I stop and ask myself another question.

Who said that?

Was it really my voice — or the voices of people who enter my day persuading me that I am being unrealistic?

Am I truly unrealistic… or am I simply allowing everyone else to speak inside my head all at once?

How do we take back the space in our own minds when it has become so crowded with the expectations of others?

It is not that the door is always locked. In fact, sometimes the door may already be open. Yet we remain standing inside the cage, wings folded, unsure if we still remember how to fly.

Perhaps it begins with voices around us — people who question our choices, our abilities, or the dreams we quietly carry within us.

At first those voices live outside of us.

But over time something subtle happens.

The words begin to echo inside our own thoughts.

And eventually we may find ourselves repeating the same doubts that once came from someone else.

“I can’t.”

“It’s not the right time.”

“I don’t have what it takes.”

Little by little the cage becomes less about the world around us and more about the walls we build inside our own minds.

This realization is not an easy one.

Because it asks us to look honestly at ourselves and wonder if the freedom we long for might require something difficult — the courage to stop listening to voices that were never meant to define us.

My Anywhere But Here space was never meant to be an escape from life.

It is a quiet place where I can sort through emotions honestly — the crowded ones, the heavy ones, the ones that leave me feeling as though the air has grown thin.

Today that reflection leads me back to the image of the bird.

A bird created to fly does not lose its wings simply because it has spent too long inside a cage.

Sometimes it only needs to remember that the sky still exists.

And perhaps the first step toward freedom is not flying immediately.

Perhaps it is simply walking toward the open door.

Susan Beth Thomas

My Anywhere But Here