It was a generically grey and gloomy Tuesday afternoon. The harsh halogen lights glaring down from the ceiling. The drone of the air conditioning unit churning out slightly warmed, stagnant air, breathed by the whole office many times over. The same four white-washed walls surrounding me, staring me in the face. And a realisation hurtled towards me: I was locked inside a box that I could not escape. In fact, I have been trapped inside boxes my whole life.
From birth to burial, boxes define our lives. No sooner are we born, than boxes are being ticked – girl/boy, black/white/asian/other – the incessant need to capture and categorise us, because somehow simply human isn’t enough. We must be organised into neat little boxes to keep us under control, to ensure we fit somewhere in society.
When we get older, we struggle to determine who we are, desperate for some definition. We put ourselves in boxes by what we do and what we say. By the things we profess to like and the things we do not. By shaping our outward appearance – the clothes, the hair, the accessories – the illusions of being something, anything to say to the world this is where I belong. We crave these self-imposed boxes, for fear of being alone, only ever looking in at the action from the sidelines. But what happens when we don’t fit neatly into a box? We are left on the outside of life, isolated, longing for a place, yearning for a tribe.
In our adult life, we go from one box to another, spending our days and nights entombed within four walls. But this is somehow OK. This is, in fact, what we have been made to believe is the goal, the height of achievement, the marker of success – congratulations, you made it! Get a comfortable office job – boxes. Get a car – boxes. Get a house – boxes. Organise the material possessions that symbolise just how successful we are into – boxes. Just fill out these forms, ticking the appropriate – boxes. We have been conditioned to think that this is our normal state of being. So we spend the majority of our adult life, day in, day out, moving from one box to the next. From car, to office, to home, where we inevitably sit and stare at the magical box, blaring out noise and images to try and allow our weary minds to escape the day’s monotony. Eat, sleep and repeat until the day that we draw our final breath, only to be put in our final resting box, nailed shut, six feet under.
Some boxes exist inside of us. The walls we put up for our own protection; they are our fortresses, our defences: we hide in them like children, playing, fooling ourselves. Our fears, our anger, our pain. We shut out the world, to prevent us from seeing, from feeling, to keep us comfortably numb, because sometimes it is all too much. Sometimes it is all that we can do to survive.
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s soon as we start putting up walls, whether bricks and mortar, or the ones that are in our hearts and minds, we start to disconnect; we see differences instead of similarities, we segregate and separate and lose touch with the very thing that we are: we are all human beings and we all suffer the same. The more we distance ourselves from each other, and from our inner selves, the further away from peace we become. If we are ever to grow and flourish and evolve, we must break free from these boxes we have become so accustomed to.
What if we had the power to knock down the walls, exist beyond the box, and simply be? What a marvellous thing it would be, to be free…
Words: Melissa Brannlund