You were never trapped 💡🌌👁️

Are you shrinking in your own world?

Image by Damian Gadal

Last week, a voicemail sent my world into a tailspin.

Everything contracted. As the week progressed, the walls closed in more and more. I became anxious, jittery—scared of my own phone, like it was a bomb waiting to explode.

Then something cracked open.

The monster in the rubber mask 👻 🎭

I’d been giving the physical world—and everyone in it—its own malevolent intelligence. As if reality had opinions about me. As if it could wake up one day and decide to lock me out. 😱

When really, it was all just scenes playing out in my awareness.

Remember those Halloween haunted houses? My friend and I once spent half an hour in the parking lot, working up the nerve to go in. Hearts pounding. Palms sweating.

Then we finally walked through and felt like idiots. It was just Jerry from the hardware store in a rubber mask, halfheartedly waving a plastic chainsaw from Walmart. 😂

Or that time on acid when I locked eyes with a swirly poster behind the DJ booth. For one terrifying moment, I was IN the poster. Trapped in its spirals forever, watching the party continue without me. Then the DJ noticed my panic, reached over, and flicked off the light.

The entire image vanished. I was free. Had been free all along.

That’s what we do. We build haunted houses with the light of our awareness. We animate entire worlds until we’re so deep inside them we forget they were ever just projections. But flip the switch, change where the light’s pointing, and the nightmare dissolves. 🌀🔦💫

I’m a writer, so I know how seductive it is to pour yourself into a story: building universes, casting characters, giving weight to every detail until it feels more real than real. But here’s what I keep forgetting: they’re just stories. They’re not all of me.

Living on crumbs

For years, I was living in this shell, and it kept shrinking.

I have big dreams. I believe in them. But I kept getting stuck on this question: what am I supposed to do with the in-between time? The waiting room between now and the life I actually want? 🤔

So I settled. Made myself smaller. Told myself it wasn’t that bad, that if I could just tolerate it a little longer, things would turn around.

(I think of my ex, who convinced me I was the hoarder while his shoe collection and half-gutted electronics—street finds he’d “definitely fix someday”—consumed our entire studio.)

The resentment built. Pretty soon I was begging for scraps. When even those dried up, I started kicking at reality like a broken vending machine, terrified it would stay jammed forever.

I was standing outside the gates, portfolio in hand, waiting for someone to finally notice me. To choose me. To hand me the golden ticket that said, “Congratulations! You made it!” 👏

Forgetting that this was MY world to begin with.

The moment the shell cracked

Image by Mattia Belletti

Then I had one of those moments that’s hard to put into words—a sudden feeling of stepping out of the shell.

All at once, I felt light. Free. Like I’d been wearing a suit of armor to bed for years and finally remembered I could take it off.

Which led to the obvious realization: Nobody can actually cut me off from love, peace, or fulfillment. Only I can do that. And I can also give it to myself whenever I want.

So why keep contorting myself to fit inside a reality that wasn’t my preference anyway? What was I protecting myself from—disappointment?

All I’d done was create a reality where I kept getting disappointed. 🤦‍♀️

Reality is reflecting, not rejecting

Every scary story, every problem I’d been frantically trying to solve—it was all happening in my awareness. I was the one giving it weight, meaning, consequence.

And if nothing has inherent meaning until I assign it, why not choose meanings that actually serve me?

Reality doesn’t have the power to reject me. It can only reflect what I’m projecting.

So what do I really have to lose by going ALL IN on what I want?

Nothing. I’ve tried living in defense mode, shrinking myself to avoid some imagined future rejection. But all that did was guarantee I’d live in a state of perpetual pre-rejection.

Now I choose to give my attention to the reality where things work out. Not from a place of thought-policing or forcing myself to be high-vibe 24/7, but because I care about myself that much.

Why torture myself with self-created horror films?

This doesn’t mean I expect life to be a meditation retreat from here on out. I’ll still have moments of forgetting, of slipping back into old programs. But those moments don’t define my trajectory any more than a commercial break defines the movie.

Memorializing the shift 🎆 🌈 👑

Here’s what I know about breakthroughs: they’re slippery. They feel crystal clear in the moment, then dissolve like dreams.

That’s why I’m writing this—not just to share it with you, but to anchor it for myself. The act of articulating it reveals new layers, makes it real in a way that simply thinking about it never could.

As A Course in Miracles teaches, student and teacher are one. In showing you the door I found, I’m learning to walk through it myself. Each time I tell this story, I understand it differently.

I’ve also created a tool for those moments when the clarity fades and you’re back to fumbling in the dark. It maps the journey from vision to manifestation, showing how even the sucky parts contribute to the greater vision. You can check it out HERE.

We all need breadcrumbs to find our way back to what we know is true. Ways to remember who we are when we’ve been playing small for so long we’ve forgotten it’s an act.

If you want to be in conversation with others who get it, my membership program might be for you. We act as lights for one another. We witness each other stepping out of our self-imposed boxes, again and again, until it starts to become second nature (or at least a little easier).

The architect’s amnesia

Maybe you’re reading this from inside your own carefully constructed prison. Not the dramatic kind with bars and locks—the subtle kind where you’ve memorized every crack in the ceiling, every excuse, every “reasonable” explanation for why things are the way they are.

The one where you’ve gotten so good at playing small that you’ve forgotten you’re acting.

Here’s the thing about self-created nightmares: they’re incredibly convincing. They have your voice, your logic, your entire history backing them up. They know exactly which buttons to push because you’re the one who installed them.

But what if the phone call you’re dreading is just static until you tune into that frequency? What if the rejection you’re anticipating is just one possible channel in an infinite spectrum—and you’re the one holding the remote?

I’m not saying flip to the happiness channel and pretend everything’s perfect. I’m saying notice how tightly you’re gripping that remote. Notice how you keep hitting replay on the same three channels of dread.

Your awareness is the projector. Not the film.

And when you really GET it (like actually get it, not just “intellectually” lol), the whole horror show becomes almost funny. Like realizing you’ve been running from your own shadow, building elaborate fortresses against your own reflection.

The walls only close in when you forget you’re the architect.