July 6, 2026
Vulnerability is a Trap, but the Cage is a Floor Plan
Notes on the “Institutional Gothic,” the “Interregnum,” and the relief of the hum.
By Tina Marie
1 min read
Originally written on April 12, 2026.
There is a specific kind of irony in crying yourself to sleep over the need for vulnerability, only to wake up to a lecture on why humans choose to live in cages.
I fell asleep to a TED Talk by Brené Brown, the salt-streaked realization of my own "vulnerability issue" finally breaking me. The tears started when she told her therapist, "I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love."
It's a beautiful sentiment, but it felt like a trap. Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, sure, but it's also the act of handing over the blueprints of your house to someone who might just burn it down. It sounded like a high-stakes gamble I wasn't prepared to make. Because when you expose yourself, you're also setting yourself up for someone to take advantage of you — disappointing you, or worse, intentionally hurting you.
After feeling as if I left myself vulnerable to someone who didn't deserve it and getting hurt, I fell asleep deciding that the trade-off wasn't worth it. I decided then and there that I was willing to trade the "positive aspects" of life just to ensure I'd never feel that specific heartache again. I was opting out.
But then the YouTube autoplay shifted. I woke up to the voice of The Functional Melancholic dissecting Erich Fromm, "freedom in a cage," and the "Institutional Gothic" — and I realized I had just described the very "prison" I was waking up in. Suddenly, my decision to build a wall didn't feel like a choice; it felt like a floor plan.
The idea of liminal spaces, or liminality, reminded me of Antonio Gramsci's "interregnum." Gramsci once wrote that "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." I realized then that my walls, my isolation, and my opting out are exactly that: "morbid symptoms." To a healthy world, they look like decay. But in my "interregnum," they are the only things helping me survive the gap. The "prison" isn't a sign that I'm lost; it's the only architecture that can hold the weight of the transition.
Sources:
The Power of Vulnerability | Brené Brown | TED (transcript)
Lost in Liminal Space: The Backrooms and the Institutional Gothic
'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic
'The time of monsters': everyone is quoting Gramsci — but what did he actually say?