Boxed In
On learning to trade safety for visibility
One of my earliest memories is standing behind a puppet-stage box at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo.
I’d been cast as Max in Where the Wild Things Are — the lead. My job was to give Max his voice while the puppet took center stage.
The set itself was a stage within a stage: a big box sitting on the larger theater stage, hiding the puppeteers while our characters faced the audience. From the outside, it probably looked whimsical. From inside, it was safe. Hidden. My voice could travel, but I didn’t have to be fully seen.
It’s funny to me now — this Russian doll of stages — how natural it felt to perform from behind something. I didn’t think about visibility. I wasn’t worried about how I looked or sounded. It was a time before I decided to hide. Before I learned the safety of boxes.
Fast forward.
It’s a bright summer afternoon in uptown Manhattan. Ashely and I are walking down Broadway near Columbia University, passing students spilling out of Starbucks, slipping into the local bookstore, or clustered in the shade along the block, hiding from the heat. The air feels heavy and warm, carrying the faint scent of coffee and asphalt baking in the sun.
We’re deep in conversation — the kind you think is private, but the City is listening. She’s always listening. And today, she’s joined the discussion. Spirit, wearing the body of Manhattan, leans in with her own commentary: a taxi horn sharp as a side-eye, the hiss of steam curling up from a manhole like an exhale, the layered bass of a passing car. A whole cacophony of sound — not interrupting us, but underlining us.
I’m telling Ashely about something Courtney — my spiritual coach, teacher, sister, friend, my own magical Tinkerbell (impossible to categorize her as just one thing) — said to me earlier. That Ashely receives because she is so visible. And here I am, in what feels like the Sahara Desert of manifestations and abundance.
Of course, I twisted it inward: If she’s visible, then I must be invisible.
Ashely stops mid-stride, looks at me, and says, “You know you’re living inside a box, right?”
She doesn’t mean an apartment. She means the invisible enclosure I’ve built to keep me safe from judgment, from being too visible.
I nod. She’s right. I tell her I can see out of the box, but only let certain people see in.
When she asks how I’d escape it, I say, “I’d turn into mist, slip under the cracks in the door, and reappear on the other side.”
She laughs, loud enough for the Columbia kids to glance over. “You can’t evaporate. You have to stay in your body.”
And suddenly I see it. The box isn’t new. I’ve been behind some version of it since that puppet stage. A stage within a stage, a self within a self, nested like Russian dolls.
Only now, I realize: I can make a door. And I can walk through it any time I want.
And as if to cosign, the City lets out a long, satisfied hiss from somewhere under the pavement. I swear Spirit is grinning, knowing I’ve just found the door.