All of us have a cage.

It's a cage we build for ourselves, over time.  We build it originally as a safeguard to contain our inner beasts, and the bars are forged from the lessons we learn about acceptability and fitting into the world around us.  This is when the cage contains things like stealing, killing, harming and such; they're things we're taught not to do, so we cage them up using the bars forged from the earliest lessons impressed upon us.

However, as we grow older, we begin to learn more about the world around us... and, because of such, we have to learn more ways we should curtail our thoughts and behaviors.  This is when we add things to the cage like lying, cheating, greed, bullying and the like; we grow from children into adulthood while assimilating all this data about behavior and what is expected of us.

This is also where we begin to have things placed in that cage that we don't want to be in it; we can't party all night, because we have school; we can't talk back to our authority figures, because they control everything; we can't live on junk food & video games, because it isn't healthy for us.  Granted, some of us indulge in these things anyway - but we're taught NOT to by the rest of the world.  So, into the cage they go.

Then, as we trek through adulthood, we begin to discover that society is much more than we ever realized as kids, and we now want to be a part of it in some way, whether to go into it in person or bring it to us via the Internet.  So, we feel we have to adopt certain ways of acting and speaking, in order to "belong" where we've found a place to fit in.  That's when we add labels to our cages, and choose things to put inside like Liberal, Democrat or Republican, and we add other things like gay, straight, lesbian, transgender, bisexual or asexual to the cage, and even trivial things like skin color or author preferences to signify that we cannot even THINK that way, else we get found out and thrown out of this place we've found to "belong".

By this point, our cages have grown large and complex... effectively making them self-contained labyrinths within our souls, keeping us penned in and preventing us from seeing anything but the view from between the bars.

Because we also begin to lock ourselves in there, as well.

When it reaches a point, you begin to feel tired.  Tired of trying, tired of talking, tired of waiting for change, tired of being stuck in the same routine, day after day.  And as you wear down, it just becomes easier to just run on auto-pilot and make it through another Tuesday at the grindstone.  Or it just becomes easier to give up.  Or it just becomes easier to not care anymore.  Whatever the reason, you begin to find more and more reasons to cage up your own words because you feel they might offend... and you no longer have the will nor strength to fight back.  Because you're so damned tired of doing it again and again.

Those are the moments to remain vigilant of, my friends; they're the things that cage up who you are.

It is vitally important to keep a steady guard up against falling victim to apathy and becoming jaded, because that's when you lose the key, and wrap yourself in angst and misery because you've grown bitter at all the bars in your cage, unable to see more than a pinprick of light at any given time.  At best.

Don't try to claim you have no cage; you do, whether you like it or not.  It's there, and YOU built it from whatever you picked up from school, friends and family.  It may be huge, small, thin, thick, anything - but you have one, regardless.

Self-reflection and self-acceptance can do well here, as they aren't exactly cages as much as they are concepts of ways to monitor & learn oneself with minimal restrictions.  After all, if you know yourself well, you should understand why you react as you do and work towards reaching an understanding of who you truly are within your own mind.  From there, you don't break the cage - NEVER break it - but you learn to allow the bars to soften, with work and patience, into strips of cloth you may then use to stitch together a suitable outcome that has you neither denying your flaws OR your strengths.

Make the cage into a cloak of personal harmony; work with challenges, not restrictions.  Don't see failure, see chances to learn.  Don't lock yourself away because you feel as though you're stifled from all directions...

Be your own key.

You'll always have a cage... you just don't always have to be in it.