The Girl in a Jar

There once was a girl who was trapped in a glass jar. She hadn’t always been trapped: she just woke up like this one day, with no idea how it had happened. She could still see everything through her transparent prison, hear the sounds of joy and music, but that world was no longer for her.

She dreamed every waking moment of what her life outside was like, of the person she’d once been. She screamed for help, but no one came. So she pushed and pushed against the glass for what felt like a lifetime, in the panicked desperation of an animal that finds itself trapped in a cage.

But no matter how hard she pushed, she could never escape; the glass was strong, and she was weak. Eventually she just lay there and stared into space, and her eyes felt so heavy she could hardly see. Like so many caged animals and people before her, her spirit finally broke.

But one day, she opened her eyes wide, fueled by memories of being just a girl, not a girl in a jar. She could feel the warmth of the sun on her face shining through the glass. She felt revived; she remembered what hope was. From that moment on, she decided that she would fight, that she refused to waste her precious life wasting away as an ornament.

Suddenly, she saw her confines with fresh eyes, and she realized that the power of escape had been within her the whole time: the jar had no lid and a ladder on the side. She’d pushed back against her confines when she should have climbed. She’d assumed defeat too early. She didn’t believe in herself; somewhere along the lines she’d been told that she was weak and worthless, and she never thought to question it. She was too broken to realize that the key to freedom lay within herself.

At first she was furious with her own perceived incompetence and thought that it was yet another example of how she wasn’t good enough: after all, what sort of fool lets themselves be trapped in a glass jar, she asked herself.

But then she realized that from that day on, there would never be another moment of her life in which she would be trapped, and that was all that mattered, because now she could do anything, she could be anything, and the only thing that kept her trapped for so long was her own self-doubt.

She didn’t run away from the jar in fear, she didn’t cower. She didn’t live under its shadow, and she refused to be “the girl who once lived in a jar.” She walked away with her head held high, because she wasn’t broken, she wasn’t weak: she was a creature of the outside.

She looked back with no trepidation, and from the outside, that jar didn’t scare her at all. It looked small, weak and pathetic, and she laughed to think she’d ever let something so ridiculous hold back the bright, confident woman she had become.

The world was better than she’d remembered, even more so than she’d dreamed. She was happy, she was strong, and she was free.