Leaving the Box
There’s a glass box in the classroom, big enough to fit a person, yet it is visible to only my eyes. The few students in the room who are dedicated enough to come in outside of school hours work silently but fervently in preparation for the exams in the upcoming weeks. The room is quiet, the silence only disturbed by sounds of keys typing and pencils scraping.
I am one of these students. I, too, work ardently to study the content in the books and laptop in front of me and commit them to memory. However, unlike these students, I do so within the confines of the glass box — the box that I only just became aware of. But despite this glass enclosure, I’m not trapped. I can move freely and I can still see my surroundings as clear as day. In fact, this box doesn’t physically exist outside of my mind.
In hindsight, by that moment in the classroom, it had been like that for a few months, maybe even a few years. I wasn’t sure. I could still see, hear, and feel my surroundings, but they seemed muted. The colors around me were dull, sounds were muffled, and my emotions were nothing more than distant flashes in the back of my mind. Nothing in my life had changed, but I was struck by the realization that while I was physically present, I had been watching my life pass before my eyes. It was then, when I became fully aware of this feeling of detachment, that my mind conjured the image of the glass box — almost imperceptible, but still there, dulling my senses. I was living my life, but I was not fully in it.
This was two years ago. In the time between then and now, it crossed my mind multiple times that living in this detached state was probably unhealthy, but such ideas were extinguished almost immediately after they arose. Maybe it warranted some concern, but I chalked it up to standard student exhaustion. Even if it was caused by something else, I wasn’t bothered. I was unfazed by the fact that not much caught let alone maintained my interest, and that quarantine seemed more like a blessing than a curse. I felt content in my glass box, perhaps for no other reason than the fact that life outside of it had become a distant memory.
But recently, I noticed the beginnings of a fracture in the glass. Over time, the break in the glass grew, revealing a door. The box I was enclosed in, albeit not unhappily, began to form an exit. An exit from the box, but an entrance to my life. All the sounds and feelings that were muffled started seeping through the crack in the glass, allowing me to see and hear clearer and feel more intensely. I no longer needed to be goaded into going out, even if it was to do something mundane like sitting at a cafe by myself or following my friend to a dentist appointment. I was leaving the glass box and re-entering my life, being engaged in the world around me rather than being detached from it and watching it go by.
Suddenly my interest is piqued by things I’m used to dismissing: writing in my own time, watching movies, and joining school clubs. I would be lying if I said I didn’t still enjoy spending time alone in my room endlessly scrolling through Instagram or YouTube — after all, the glass box is still there, only now it has an exit. But re-entering my own life, taking every opportunity to be proactive and trying new things doesn’t sound as draining anymore. I no longer look at my life through the lens of an outsider, instead I immerse myself in its existence.
