There’s just something about shackles…

Ah Daisy
3 min readApr 21, 2024

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Fetters, bonds, manacles, chains, handcuffs, and all in their likeness to bondage.

Caricature illustration

Bondage… that’s all this is. Much bigger than being put in a box with its walls so near, that you can’t breathe, rather it’s like being in a vast ocean, drowning, with nothing to hold on to; free falling through boundless sky. Premeditated and actively occurring, it is an infinite condition; an ode to past (experience), present (coping mechanisms), and future (ramifications).

As there’s a subject, an object and some action there are the bound (bonded person), the binder (bonding cause), and the bond that gets formed. This is about to be a mouthful, but get this: the bound, unknowingly, prepares to be bind, or the binder, knowingly, prepares to bind; the binder bonds the bound; and perhaps worst of all, neither the bound, nor the binder, can erase the scars.

The visible or invisible scars, the feeling of having been bonded, the hangover effect, oh how it takes forever to heal.

In the early stages, you still move like you moved while in bondage, in the middle part, you still think like you did while in bondage, and in the end… you still remember how it felt to be in bondage.

An endless ending it seems.

A gruesome cycle because make no mistake, for you could once again find yourself trying to move but you can’t move freely, you could find yourself lost again, rolling in the deep, suffocating through thoughts of shackles, in despair and desperate for freedom from yourself. As if it wasn’t bad enough the first time.

It’s all in your head so they call you crazy. They call it PTSD, anxiety, delusions or hallucinations. Meanwhile, in actuality you are simply a deranged woman, whose muscles and nerves still remember how to release friction or relieve tension subconsciously. So unhinged, because why are you still on fight or flight mode?

Does it mean you have screws loose in your brain? And that is why the past still lives in your present?

The effects of the zip ties and the ropes, the shackles, don’t ever really disappear from your mind, body or soul. The healing has turned out to be a lifelong journey.

Everyone makes it to the end someday, and sometimes we wish they could give us tips and advice, any at all, but they can’t…because they’re gone already. They are already living their lives after death (if any exists).

Most times I wish them luck and clarity in their journey, other times, I wonder. I wonder if the dead get to start afresh in their life after death. A new life, free from the soul ties from past trauma, free of bondage i.e. freedom in it’s purest form.

Maybe it is so, maybe it is not so, but we can never truly know that now, can we? All that is left to do in this reality is to heal everyday, until there’s nothing left to heal.

To live until life is no more…

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Ah Daisy

Catch me whenever you can… I’ll be here, there or wherever