It’s not the bars you see- It’s the ones you don't.
I know how to look calm while panicking. How to make my stillness look like something thats not batshit crazy. How to be admired, pitied, and forgotten all in the same hour. Lately, I feel like an animal shoved into a glass box for observation.Not because I’m dangerous but because I’m too strange to leave roaming free. They built the walls high enough that I stopped trying to scale them. They made the windows clean enough that I started confusing visibility for safety.
And now, here I am: pacing internally, smiling. Externally, rotting.
I am what happens when you domesticate fear. What happens when you turn rage into sarcasm, grief into productivity, loneliness into a "busy girl" aesthetic. I want to tear the whole thing apart sometimes.I want to claw at the walls and smash the glass with my bare hands. But I don't.
Because good girls don’t bleed where people can see it. We fold ourselves into quieter shapes.I perform contentment until I believe it.
You don't get a memorial for what you repress. You just get a tighter cage.
I don't know what I'd even do with freedom now. Probably waste it. Probably sit in the open field and cry because no one's watching. Probably spend my entire summer in Europe.
It’s not the captivity that kills you. It’s the self you amputate to fit inside it.
And the worst part? They’ll call it growth, maturity, healing.
I’ll smile for the tourists. Wave politely. Keep dying. There's a term for it.
Zoochosis.
It's what happens when wild animals live too long in captivity. They develop repetitive, compulsive behaviors spacing, swaying, chewing the bars, tearing out their own fur. It's not because I’m bad. It’s because something inside me broke trying to adapt. I’m not trying to escape, I’m just trying to survive.I wonder if that’s what I’m doing.I’m pacing the same arguments in my head. Chewing old memories until they're soft and flavorless.Ripping pieces out of myself, then apologizing for the mess.
Zoochosis looks like resilience if you don't know the symptoms. Repression looks good under museum lighting. So does madness.
I’m also crazy, by the way.
There are so many insights in this post, but what resonates with me the most is the idea of performance as survival. That line about how society expects people, especially women, to suppress pain, stay likable, and remain in control really struck me. The truth is, I think we all perform contentment at times, even when we’re far from okay inside. Thank you for putting this into words. It helped me make sense of the mask I’ve been wearing. Keep sharing your thoughts, even the darkest ones. Sometimes, it’s those very shadows that cast light into our own.
you're very insightful, you have a gift for analysis based on rebelliousness, you must draw a lot of attention IRL. You should be getting paid to write like this. 😁