I was raised in a cage

In a home where control replaced everything else

I remember I was around 12.

I started talking to my room. I couldn’t hold it in anymore, so I created something in my head — an entity that could see me, hear me.

It was as if my room came to life at night, when I was finally alone — finally allowed to exist — and it listened to me.

I would ramble. Whatever needed to come out. There was an urgency to it, like pressure building with nowhere else to go.

It was the only time I felt safe.

And then a new day would come.

Same house. Back in position.

Doing, feeling, and saying what I was expected to.

Because I was never allowed to actually exist.

I was an object.

And you know how people treat an object. They look at it. They occasionally dust it off. They keep it as decoration.

An object is not expected to have needs. It doesn’t speak or feel. It serves.

And that was me.

You would think I at least found somewhere to write — to express what was aching inside me.

You would be wrong.

Even that was taken from me.

My father once found my diary and exploded with rage — as if the fact that I had thoughts, feelings of my own, was something to be punished.

He violated every boundary. They couldn’t even exist.

I was only allowed to exist within his narrow, control-obsessed version of the world.

He was deeply unwell, but that was never allowed to be seen outside the house.

So I adapted.

I had no other option.

I wasn’t allowed to go out, to have friends, to live freely — everything was controlled. And eventually, that control moved inside me.

I was trapped inside his distorted version of reality, forced to absorb his unsettled inner state.

No one saw it. I lived it.

There were times when I would set him off with things that sometimes happen to teenage girls — bad grades, dating the wrong boy… and the rage in him was waiting. So I would lock myself in my room and not come out, because in those moments, just seeing me was enough to make him explode.

I lived in fear. In anxiety. In a cage.

When I was nineteen, I ended up in a very dark, toxic relationship — with a deeply troubled guy, a drug addict who had been in juvenile detention.

Something in me recognized his darkness and was drawn to it.

My father found out.

I didn’t leave my room. It was the only way to stay safe.

That’s how threatened I was. That’s how much fear I lived in.

My mother would bring me food.

Once, I had to leave the house for an exam. An uber was waiting for me outside.

To get out, I had to pass through the room he was in.

No matter how quietly or quickly I tried to move, trying to escape before he noticed me — he caught me on the terrace stairs.

He slapped me. Hard.

My face vibrated.

I had exactly two seconds to pull myself together.

I put on my sunglasses and got into the uber.

I passed the exam.

With the highest score.

The cage didn’t break me.

The smaller my world got,
the further my mind went.

While everything outside of me was controlled, restricted, watched —
inside, there were no borders.

No one could follow me there.
No one could enter.

That’s where I became untouchable.

He could confine my body.

Not my mind.
Not what I saw.
Not what I thought.
Not what I built inside it.

What was meant to shrink me
gave me range.

What was meant to silence me
made me think deeper.

What was meant to contain me
taught me how to exist without permission.

And that’s the part no one saw.

The expansion didn’t happen outside.
It happened where no one could reach it.

And that’s why I’m not who that life was supposed to produce.

I didn’t become what he intended.

I became what he couldn’t touch.

I didn’t find freedom. I built it where no one could reach me.