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We are born into a world already scripted for us.
Long before our first cry, the lines of the cage have been drawn—patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, bigotry, rigid gender roles, judgmental religious ideologies—all converging to form a lattice of invisible bars. These bars dictate who we are allowed to be, how we must speak, how we must love, what we must believe, and even how we must dress if we wish to be accepted, respected, or worthy of love.
We do not choose this cage.
It is handed down through culture, family, and institutions, dressed up as “morality,” “tradition,” or “the way things are.” And yet, its weight is undeniable. It presses against our ribs, narrowing our breath, teaching us early that there are rules to belonging. To step outside those rules is to risk exile, ridicule, punishment, or worse.
In this world, boxes replace possibility. We are told that to be a “good woman” is to be obedient, nurturing, selfless, and pleasing. To be a “real man” is to be strong, unemotional, dominant, and successful at any cost. To exist outside these binaries—to be queer, trans, non-binary, gender-fluid—is to be branded as deviant, broken, or unworthy.
Even those who attempt to conform find the boxes unbearably tight, cutting off air, circulation, and spirit.
Religion and ideology, in their corrupted forms, sharpen these edges. They whisper that deviation from the script is sin. They transform natural human expressions—desire, tenderness, vulnerability, creativity—into shameful burdens to be hidden. The irony is cruel: what makes us most human is declared unholy. What makes us most alive is condemned.
The damage is subtle at first, like a slow leak in the roof of the soul.
But over time, the erosion is profound. These systems do not simply dictate behavior; they colonize the imagination. They dim the inner fire that allows us to see ourselves as vast, infinite, ever-becoming. They cut us off from the ancestral wisdom that once celebrated multiplicity, honored the cycles of nature, and embraced the many ways of being human.
Instead, we are trained to distrust our own hearts. To look outward for permission. To measure our worth by rules that were never designed for our thriving. The result is self-loathing disguised as virtue. People walk the earth as hollowed-out forms, zombie-like, numbed to both suffering and wonder, unable to imagine that a different way is possible.
When the cage becomes all we know, the magic begins to die.
Not the sleight-of-hand magic of illusionists, but the deep magic—the ability to feel awe, to sense our connection to everything alive, to know ourselves as creators, dreamers, healers, and lovers of life. This magic is the pulse of authenticity, the sacred spark of imagination and spirit that makes us fully alive.
Patriarchy and its allies know this. That is why they fear it, why they police it, why they have spent centuries suppressing it. A person who remembers their own magic cannot be controlled. A community that remembers its magic cannot be divided. A people who live in freedom and imagination cannot be enslaved to systems of profit, hierarchy, or domination.
But cages, no matter how strong, are not eternal. They depend on our compliance. The cracks are already there—every act of resistance, every refusal to be defined, every choice to love radically, every insistence on authenticity loosens the bars. Every memory of ancestral wisdom, every reconnection with the love in our own hearts, calls back the magic.
The truth is, we are not meant to live as caged beings. Our souls are too vast, our creativity too wild, our potential too expansive.
The systems that bind us are powerful, yes, but they are not as powerful as what lives within us. The body remembers freedom. The heart remembers love. The spirit remembers magic.
To step beyond the cage is not easy. It requires courage, imagination, and community. But it is the only path that leads us back to our full humanity, to a world where worth is not conditional, where love is not rationed, and where we are free to become the limitless beings we were always meant to be.
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