I don't want to fit in a box
On the expectations we fight and the ones we don’t see
Several years ago, a German businessman was trying to figure out where to put me.
He wanted to hire me. But when he looked at my CV, he couldn’t work out what box I fit into. Was I a product manager? A marketing specialist? A strategist? A communications expert? I’d done all of it, and more.
He wasn’t wrong to be confused. I’d never chosen my work based on a defined career path or a ladder to climb. I chose based on what interested and excited me next. If I wasn’t inspired, I moved on. Sometimes to something completely different.
It meant I didn’t fit neatly into boxes defined by the corporate world. And sometimes that made me feel like I didn’t quite fit anywhere. But that discomfort was still less than the frustration of feeling trapped within a specific box.
I hate boxes. Not the cardboard kind. Those are quite useful. The expectation kind. The instant I feel someone else deciding what I should be, a volcano stirs inside, and I become like a caged lion.
Tell me how I should live. I fight.
Tell me how I must work. I fight.
What I didn’t realise was that I’ve also built some of my own boxes.
During a spiritual hypnosis session, I met a character I came to call Thor. A sort of French villain-looking figure who danced around in a cocky way, performing for attention. When asked what he actually needed, he paused. Underneath the performance, he was sad and gentle. He felt he had to be that character to be seen.
And then I noticed something. Thor was dancing inside a glass box.
He could move around what felt like the whole universe. So he thought he was free. But he was dancing on the spot inside a confined space. He just couldn’t see the walls. They represented what others expected of him, and his own beliefs about what he should do and how big he was allowed to get.
Even if he could leave the box, he was afraid. Afraid of being overwhelmed by possibility. Of getting lost in it. He wanted to be free, yet the walls provided an odd sense of safety.
Thor was me.
There are boxes I will fight with everything I have. The ones other people try to put me in. The ones that say: this is who you should be, this is how you should work, this is the shape your life should take. Those I can see clearly, and I come out swinging.
But the glass ones? The ones built from my own beliefs about what I should do, what’s safe, what’s possible for someone like me? Those are harder. I can’t always see the walls. And if I’m honest, some of them still serve me in ways I don’t yet fully comprehend.
The problem is that a box is a box, even when you built it yourself.
In the session, I asked Thor where he wanted to go. He went to a silver planet with a huge sun. Crystal buildings, gentle intelligent beings in silver clothes. And there, he cut a hole in the glass box and floated through.
The people on the silver planet celebrated. Not because he had performed for them. Because he had broken through.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. The boxes I can see and have been fighting against. But now, even more, the ones I can’t see, that I may have created myself.
I’m ready to see them and break through them. Maybe you are too.