About six and a half years ago, I was on a train, traveling across the country, on my way to meet my mom. With nothing to do, I whipped up my laptop and started writing a story I was thinking about. A mesh of some concepts and ideas I had.
It was a story about a girl trapped in a massive dungeon, being sent back in time to the beginning every time she died to one of its many dangers.
That story would later become the very first piece of writing I would share with the wide world and upload to the internet.
Unlike the many projects of the past, even after I arrived, I kept on writing. The words just kept pouring out of me without stopping. Something about the story just resonated with me. Even as I uploaded the prologue for the initial review, I kept on writing and writing.
Why?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the concept of the story itself was a metaphor for how I felt at the time.
Trapped, alone, and exhausted.
Like I was constantly trying to find a way out of the hellhole I was in.
Like I had no one to rely on but myself.
Like every mistake I made would negate all my effort and send me back to the start, so to speak.
I don’t know whether this mood was what resonated with people, or whether they just liked the adventure of the story, but it got pretty popular quite fast. It motivated me to write more and more, and I eventually got to the point where Reiza escaped the dungeon.
And then, I had no idea what to do.
Reiza escaped her cage, but I did not. I was still trapped.
From that point onward, I tried adding more characters and plot and turning it into a proper story, but it never resonated with me the same way those first few chapters did. I kept going in order to not disappoint the readers, but ultimately burned myself out and stopped right near the end.
I tried writing a few more things after that, but again, none of them really resonated with me. They felt hollow, pointless, pretentious.
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And so I stopped writing for the time being while continuing to trudge through the hell that was my life.
About a year later, I came to a realization. My cage? A lot of it was my home situation and my toxic family, yes. But that wasn’t all. The bigger part of my cage was my own physical body itself. That’s why I seemingly couldn’t escape it - I was carrying it with me everywhere.
It took me a while and I kept doubting myself every step of the way, but I got some help, talked to a therapist, attended some meet-ups, and I eventually admitted to myself that it was true. My identity did not match my body, I was transgender.
It put a lot of things into perspective. Like why had I insisted the MC, who I was so heavily projecting into, is female with that one commenter and got upset when they ignored it? Why was it so hard for me to write a male main character at all?
It has been a long journey since then. At some point, I went back and edited all the chapters where I referred to myself and changed the pronouns to female. It felt a bit petty but also oddly cathartic.
Since posting the conclusion, my life changed so much to the point where I literally think of the “before” time as my previous life.
I quit school, found a simple job, made enough money to move away from my toxic family, found new friends, started hormone therapy, and finally, at the end of last month, I got my surgery.
It only took me over 6 six years (compared to the 64~ years someone had calculated it took Reiza) but I can finally confidently say that I escaped my own cage.
I’m no longer dreading waking up in the mornings. No longer just trying to survive another day. Existing feels alright now. I’m looking forward to the future. I’m happy to just be alive - something I used to think was impossible.
I wandered back here a while back at random and found that a bunch of new people read this and left nice comments, and it honestly warmed my heart. To all of you - thank you.
I thought countless times about doing the rewrite. I started drafts, wrote chapter 1s, plotted out the whole thing, but it never really felt right to me.
Yes, I could probably write a much better story nowadays than back then, but this story is different from the others. It’s something personal to me. It’s like a time capsule, a photograph of the past me struggling and being confused. That’s something I would never be able to capture again, nor would I want to, so, in the end, I decided against rewriting Endless Cage.
But that is not to say I won’t be writing again. No, in fact, I have already been writing again for a while now. Just away from this old identity and this site (which honestly, I found to be quite toxic at times).
If you want to, you can check out the new me and my new works. I go by BottledChaos these days and post everything I write to ScribbleHub.
Thanks for reading this little conclusion to what amounted to my previous life. Have a good day!