craft not cage
The cage was never the work.
The cage is the zero-sum room: your winning needs my losing, weakness is a thing to be taken, and the price of entry is armor. The craft is the work itself. It never needed the cage.
What I want is the other thing. A container where the armor comes off, and there is enough for all. One that still knows you when you come back changed, instead of asking your name. Where you can be vulnerable, because that is the true shape of a person: strong and fragile at once. The armor insists you are only the strong part. The container holds both.
There is nothing here to take from me: you can't win from me, and I want you to win too.
I haven't found that room yet. So we keep looking.
The hope is plain, and it is the whole of it: a place where the weakest, rawest version of me can show up, and the armor stays off.