The Cage Doesn’t Define Me Anymore

by Rose Calder

She used to think she was the cage. That the bars were part of her body. That the lock was her own shame, and the silence her only language. For so long, she forgot that she had ever lived outside of it.

“I thought the cage was who I was.”

She didn’t build it, not really. It was assembled from scraps she was handed: rules, warnings, punishments, and whispered expectations. It was enforced by fathers who didn’t know how to love, by mothers who loved through control, by lovers who called possession “protection,” and by a world that confused obedience with worth.

“I confused being chosen with being owned.”

She grew up thinking survival was love. That staying was strong. That shrinking meant safety. So when the walls closed in, she didn’t protest. She made them pretty. She painted them with promises. She convinced herself that flight was for other women. Braver women. Luckier ones.

“I learned to perform my pain in silence. I called it strength.”

She stayed because no one ever told her she could leave. Because every attempt to stretch her wings was met with guilt, or judgment, or the echo of voices telling her she was selfish for even trying. And so she stayed. Until the staying nearly ended her.

“I forgot how to want more.”

But then something shifted. It wasn’t sudden. It didn’t roar. It whispered. A crack in the foundation. A light through the slats. A single moment of rebellion, tiny but real.

She didn’t leave all at once. She crept. She tested. She began again.

The first time she said “no,” she trembled. The first time she told her story, she sobbed. The first time she touched her own body without shame, she cried for all the years she hadn’t.

“I didn’t know freedom would hurt before it healed.”

But it did. And it does. And still, she rose.

She started unlearning everything they taught her. That her value was conditional. That her beauty was borrowed. That her desire was dangerous. She rewrote every lie in the language of truth.

“My body is not a debt to be paid. My voice is not a disruption. My story is not too much.”

She stopped apologizing for the space she takes up. She stopped asking for permission. She stopped making herself smaller to be digestible. She stopped calling her pain “a phase.” She stopped hiding.

“She stood in her full height. And the sky didn’t collapse. It widened.”

She became the woman she needed when she was younger. The one who doesn’t flinch. The one who speaks up. The one who wears pleasure like a second skin. The one who says, “This is mine,” and means it.

“I am not defined by what I endured. I am revealed by what I became.”

She still remembers the cage. Some nights it visits in her dreams. Sometimes it shows up in the mirror, or in the hesitation before she speaks. But she doesn’t live there anymore. She knows the difference now between fear and instinct. Between submission and surrender. Between silence and peace.

She doesn’t fight to be seen. She knows she is worth witnessing.

The cage was part of her story. But it is not her ending. She didn’t escape it by accident. She outgrew it. She evolved. She earned every feather, every tear, every breath of sky.

“I will never go back. Even when I miss the walls.”

Because now, when she sees another woman peeking out from behind her own bars, she doesn’t look away. She holds her gaze and says, “You are not the cage either. And you never were.”

“I don’t rescue anyone. I remind them of their wings.

And that, she knows, is what it means to fly.

Still Rising, Rose

RoseCalder.Substack.com