There are boundaries in my life that I accepted as facts for a long time. Not because anyone had visibly imposed them on me, but because at some point I had stopped questioning them. Certain things supposedly did not suit me. For others, I was already too late. With some decisions, I knew in advance that they would not be right for me. Beliefs like these did not feel like walls. They felt sensible, familiar and, in some ways, even protective. Only much later did I begin to ask myself how many of my supposed limitations had actually arisen from reality, and how many from thoughts, experiences and fears that I had turned into something fixed over the years. The image of a prison of our own making may sound harsh at first, but for me it describes something deeply human: we can settle within boundaries whose doors have long been open without even noticing that we were the ones who once closed them.
The first walls often arise long before we understand what they will later do to us. We hear what is sensible, what is better avoided, what we are supposedly good or bad at, and what is expected of us. Then our own experiences are added to this. One rejection can be enough to make me more cautious the next time. Several disappointments can eventually become the conviction that certain things always end in the same way anyway. An experience becomes an expectation, the expectation becomes a habit, and the habit eventually becomes something I call my personality. Then I no longer say, “I was afraid back then.” I say, “That’s just the way I am.” For me, that sentence is one of the least noticeable building blocks of such inner prisons, because it suddenly makes something changeable appear unchangeable.
Fear plays a particular role in this. At first, it wants to protect us, and therefore has a good reason for being there at all. If I have been hurt once, I remember the situation. If something went wrong, my mind becomes more cautious the next time. It only becomes problematic when an old danger begins to influence every new possibility. Then I am responding not only to what is happening now, but also to what happened before. I know this from many different situations. It does not even require great fear. Often, that quiet inner hesitation is enough, telling me that it would be better to stay with what I know. The familiar can be unsatisfying and still feel safer than something I do not yet know. This creates a strange form of captivity: I remain voluntarily in a room that has become too small for me because I do not know what is waiting for me outside it.
Habits reinforce these boundaries because they require so little attention. Once I have done something often enough, I no longer have to make a conscious decision about it. In everyday life, that is enormously useful. But the same ability can also cause me to keep following paths that no longer suit me. I think in familiar ways, react in relationships according to known patterns, avoid the same situations and, by doing so, repeatedly confirm that my view of myself and the world must be right. If, for example, I tell myself for long enough that I am not someone who can assert themselves, I will avoid situations in which I might discover precisely that I can. Afterwards, I lack the experience that would challenge my belief. In this way, the boundary confirms itself.
What fascinates me is how little this prison has to feel like captivity. A real prison is recognised by its walls and locked doors. Inner limitations, by contrast, often carry names such as reason, security, character or experience. They give me explanations I can live with. I do not have to ask whether fear is holding me back if I can tell myself that I am simply being realistic. I do not have to examine whether an old habit is limiting me if I regard it as part of my personality. These explanations are not always wrong. That is precisely what makes them so convincing. Most of the time, they contain enough truth for me not to have to look at the other part.
Over time, I became aware that freedom therefore does not only mean having external possibilities. In theory, I may be able to take many different paths and still restrict myself inwardly to only a few. No one has to forbid me from changing something if I am already convinced that I cannot. No one has to keep me small if I have taken over that task myself. At first, that may sound uncomfortable because it brings responsibility back to me. At the same time, I find something liberating in precisely that. If at least some of my boundaries have been learnt, adopted or formed through experience, then they are not automatically permanent. That does not mean that every person can simply achieve anything if only they think differently. Real limitations exist, circumstances differ, and not every obstacle arises in our minds. I am talking about those boundaries I no longer examine because they feel like reality.
This is where the subject connects very clearly for me with I – Your Best Liar. In the book, I explore precisely these subtle forms of self-manipulation. Not a voice that consciously deceives us, but patterns that have become so familiar that we believe them. The inner liar does not necessarily say, “You must not be free.” She is more likely to say, “It isn’t worth it.” “You can’t do it anyway.” “Now isn’t the right time.” “Others are better at it.” Or she reminds me of earlier experiences and turns them into a law for the future. That is exactly why I often recognise such mechanisms only late. They do not sound like prison guards. They sound like my own reasonable voice.
I have found that inner boundaries rarely dissolve simply because I tell myself the opposite. If I am afraid, it helps me very little to tell myself that I am not afraid. If a belief has grown over decades, it does not disappear because of a positive phrase. What I find more interesting is the moment when, for the first time, I no longer believe it completely. When “I can’t do that” becomes an honest “How do I actually know that I can’t?” Nothing changes outwardly in that small doubt, but the wall loses its certainty. For me, freedom often begins exactly there, not with a dramatic escape, but with the first crack in a story I had long believed to be true.
Today, I sometimes ask myself how many doors in my life I consider locked without ever checking whether they still are. Some may genuinely have been closed once. Others I avoided for good reason. But an old boundary does not automatically remain right simply because it has been there for a long time. And so I no longer imagine this self-created prison as a dark place. I see it more as a familiar room I know so well that I could find every piece of furniture in the dark. What is unsettling is not that the door might be locked. It is the possibility that it has been open for a long time and that I have simply become so used to the room that I have forgotten to look outside.