Freedom and its Cage
We carry death on our shoulders because life is so fleeting that, if we are not reminded of its impermanence, we will take it for granted. Dead squirrels on the road, bugs smashed against tables, and ants flicked away at the earliest convenience—killed for the crime of being small. Do we not march in tandem, arm in arm, with our small counterparts in this fate? We live in a constant dance with death, where the pursuit of freedom becomes a way to mask our fear of impermanence. Yet, in seeking freedom, we only find ourselves more imprisoned by the very fragility we long to escape.
I have recently been contemplating life with a kind of feverish intensity. I'm not sure if it's due to my tendency to overthink or because the sun shone too long into my eyes, but, nonetheless, I find myself wondering why peace and death fall so gracefully together, as if they were always meant to meet. In my contemplation, I fantasize that I am a samurai, and the peaceful bliss I have built surrounds me like moths to a light pole. In that life, I would fall on my sword and commit seppuku before being caged like a bird. But then the fog clears: I’m stuck in a cycle of constant demands, a slave to deadlines, and I realize I’ve already bought into this life of 'caged bliss.
I think I ultimately find discomfort in living within a society that seems built on meaningless routines. The tension between obligation and desire feels like a high-stakes circus act—a performance I can barely stomach to watch, let alone participate in. Sometimes, I find myself standing for no particular reason, staring out a window, wondering what lies beyond my current reality. What am I missing by being here, now, in this moment? This thought cycle plays viciously in my mind, and I have to ground myself, reminding myself to be present with every atom in my body, even as the world continues to blur around me. It is in moments like these that I am reminded how easily the very nature of freedom slips away when it is not awake within us.
I once dated a man who seemed so free that I envied his deepest breath, as if he were living more fully than I was in this act of respiration. The more intertwined we became, the closer I got to his freedom, but the further I strayed from my own. In pursuing freedom through him, I found myself trapped, bound to the rules of a man who was supposed to embody it. It was then I learned that proximity to freedom—and the mistake of closeness—should not be confused with true liberation. For in tasting another's sense of freedom, you lose touch with your own and become imprisoned by the very ideals you seek to embrace.
In my search for figures who embody freedom, I found not peace, but disruption. Figures like Loki, Sekhmet, Maui, Anansi, Coyote, and Eris all seemed to represent freedom not as tranquility, but as chaos. It struck me—freedom, in so many myths, is not a quiet escape, but a force that shatters, unsettles, and rebels. Why, then, do we tend to associate freedom with destruction rather than peace? The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if we’ve misunderstood what freedom truly requires. We’re told freedom must be fought for, seized—sometimes even violently. But what if the freedom we seek doesn’t come with such a high cost?
The truth is, we exist in a society that encourages us to overlook the fragility of life, to ignore the small deaths we encounter every day—whether it’s the ladybug crushed beneath our foot or the slow decay of our souls, buried under the weight of routine. We are told to keep moving, to chase freedom and peace, but in doing so, we often find ourselves trapped by the very systems that promise us liberation. The pursuit of freedom, it seems, has become less an act of defiance and more another step toward a form of caged submission. To be free—truly and wickedly free—what must we do?
