The Glass Coffin: Understanding the Metaphor
She didn’t draw the image. She found it — a simple Miffy –style illustration of Snow White lying in a glass coffin. A childlike picture, flat colours, clean lines, nothing dramatic. She kept it without knowing why. Only later did she understand that she had recognised herself in it long before she had language for the feeling.
The glass coffin wasn’t a fairy‑tale sleep. It was fragility. It was containment. It was the perfect metaphor for a girl who had survived childhood trauma not by becoming stronger, but by becoming careful. She thought she would grow bigger, rise up, become a bear. But trauma doesn’t make children fierce. It makes them adaptive. It teaches them to hold everything together for everyone else. It teaches them to stay small so they don’t get hurt again.
The glass case showed what she couldn’t see at the time: she didn’t have much to function with. She protected what little she had. And when life hit her, she didn’t crack neatly — she shattered. Shards everywhere. She had used that metaphor before without realising how accurate it was. Shards aren’t just broken pieces; they are evidence. They show where the pressure was. They show what hit her. They show how thin the glass really was.
For years she lived inside that glass case without knowing it. ND wiring masked the damage. Oestrogen held the scaffolding together. She carried everyone’s pieces, believing that meant strength. But when perimenopause arrived — sudden, violent, uninvited — the scaffolding fell away. The hormones dropped. The masking collapsed. And the truth finally came into view.
Everything she had seen before was clouded. Her life flipped — what she thought was strength was survival, what she thought was coping was masking, what she thought was personality was adaptation. She wasn’t failing. Her make‑up had changed. Her brain had changed. The damage was old, and the clarity was new.
She has gone around the lighthouse now. She can see the coastline, the storm, the rocks. She can see the glass coffin for what it was — not a fairy‑tale pause, but a fragile container she built to survive. And she can see herself stepping out of it, finally understanding the architecture of her own life.
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