The Dollhouse Years

Settling is a waste of life.

When we stay too long in a place we don’t belong, we begin to settle.

It is bad adaptation, the conformity to something that should be intolerable; an adjustment to a soul-sucking routine.

We even get comfortable after a while, settling into the ‘niceness’ of the familiar.

But that comfort is a killer, murdering vibrant dreams in cold blood as mediocrity and blandness cheer with maniacal glee.

It is sometimes a slow and painful death: a deviously methodical strangulation; a gradual stifling of the best parts of a life till liveliness is replaced by a bitter resignation or worse, an oblivious contentment strikingly resembling idiocy.

We settle into roles we are not meant for, looking as silly as an adult crammed into a dollhouse: discomfited yet gamely sipping imaginary tea from a too-small teacup.

It’s called a life of struggle.

We get used to wearing ill-fitting uniforms, our shame fading along with their colours as we adjust from the inside out.

We blend into the scenery, glorious orchids mimicking pedestrian grass because we’ve been in poor company for too long and their unfortunate presence has infected our core.

From iridescence to a vapid green, we devolve, always closer to being basic than when we began.

And devolution begins in the mind.

If mindsets are powerful, contagious and potentially dangerous things, small mindedness is a nuclear bomb going off every second.

Mushroom clouds growing infinitely, everything that once mattered is corrupted repeatedly by the fallout.

Good things shrivel, valuable mental weight is lost till the cranium becomes a wind-swept void and there’s a deathly silence in the cavity where a passionate heart used to beat with wild enthusiasm.

The new, tragically emaciated self rejects the old dreams: they are suddenly “too much,” “too demanding” or “impossible.”

Dreaming is replaced with a quest for survival: that primordial pursuit undeserving of the application of higher brain functions.

Survival becomes the sole objective, one foot placed in front of the other as the cavernous soul shuffles along in mere existence.

Excuses fly like atomised saliva in a violent verbal altercation.

There’s always a ‘because’ ready for every ‘why’.

Weak excuses, foolish reasons for being less than the ‘more’ we were designed to be, irrational rationales for opting out of meaningful living.

Another life wasted in the pursuit of worthless things, like trying to fill hollow spaces with air.

Can you hear the wind whistling in the emptiness?

It’s the soundtrack of misplacement, the theme of the dollhouse years.