A Reckoning on the Road - Part 1: The Encounter

---

The road stretched out ahead of me, long and spacious, wrapped in a silence that didn’t feel empty, but expectant. The landscape itself felt like a vast, open embrace—wide sky, rolling desert hills, no distractions—like it had shaped itself to hold whatever was about to surface. After the intensity of a recent breathwork session, I needed motion—some kind of rhythm to help make sense of the experience. I wasn’t looking for answers. Just space.

And then I saw him.

He stood just off the highway, cloaked in shadow but impossible to ignore. It was as if the land itself had conspired to reveal him. The road narrowed, and the hills pressed in around me. It felt like being funneled toward something waiting to be faced. And there he was—inside a cage I must've passed a hundred times but never really noticed before. Iron bars rooted in cracked asphalt. A structure that felt more like a scar than steel.

He was pacing like an animal.

Filthy with soot and rage, he gripped the bars with both hands and howled. Not a cry for help. A declaration of war. His eyes were wild, his chest heaved, his face contorted into something beyond anger—something primal, feral, wounded.

He locked eyes with me.

I felt it in my spine: a jolt of recognition.

He started wailing. At me. At the sky. At whatever force had pressed pause on his creativity, his purpose, his passion.

“You’d rather let me rot than take a risk. You’d rather watch me die than face being average!”

He slammed his fists into the bars again and again until blood streaked the rusted metal. His voice cracked as he roared, “I will BURN IT ALL DOWN before I live like this any longer.”

I didn’t move.

Because I knew who he was.

He was the part of me that I've held in stillness for too long—the part that feels there's a purpose to my life but can't see what it is, doesn’t know what direction to take, doesn’t feel inspired or worthy or clear. The part that’s been circling the edges of something unnamed, yearning for a way forward.

He was the fear of being mediocre, of creating something flawed and being seen in my imperfection. The terror of showing up as I am and discovering it’s not enough. He was desperation in its most dangerous form: unexpressed life force.

And he terrified me.

He wasn’t just angry—he was done. He didn’t want healing. He wanted impact. Action. Anything but this hollow paralysis. He’d rather destroy the entire damn road than keep waiting for me to move.

I sat on the bike, frozen.

Not because I didn’t want to help him—but because I wasn’t sure I'd survive opening the cage.

---

Continued in Part 2: The Fear and the Cage Door