Here’s the thing about breaking free; you first have to realize you’re trapped. But when you’ve spent your whole life behind glass you don’t realize sometimes prison bars are transparent.

We traded our freedom for “safety” the night we figured out what it takes to be popular, what it takes to be loved. When laughter became wrinkles and sunshine, cancer. We thought the bubble was the perfect solution, able to see all that life throws at us but safe from its crippling touch. But that’s how it goes, doesn’t it? We build our boxes thinking they’re paradise when really they’re prisons, isolating us from hope, love, humanity. All the things we’re missing, wishing we had. They appear to be just within reach because we’ve wiped the glass clean, unable to stand for even our prisons to be less than perfect. Meanwhile, we work and we don’t play and we sit in our little boxes, prisons built to protect us from the pressures of life, when instead the pressure around me grows as I do but the glass doesn’t. Soon what was once a safe haven becomes suffocating. Oxygen fading, colors blurring, head pounding until I’m forced to shrink. 9 by 5, all the space I get.

Even should I break the glass, free myself, what would I do? Everyone else is trapped behind the glass, unable or unwilling to free themselves. It’s like they once said, most people don’t want to be unplugged and they will fight to protect the system.

So where does that leave me? Do I just wander until I find someone else who wants to be free, then wander with them? What is the point of being free if I’m the only one?

Maybe that is the point. Maybe that’s why we stay inside, ignore the isolation, live content in suffocation, because it’s so much easier to trick ourselves into thinking we’re not trapped than it is to sustain ourselves outside our glass prisons.