The Mind Zoo
For years, I believed I owned this zoo. Then one afternoon, I noticed visitors stopping outside my enclosure. A small child tugged at her mother's sleeve.
"What animal is that?"
The woman studied me for a long time before answering, but sadly, I couldn't hear what she whispered.
People often assume the zoo belongs to me because I carry it everywhere I go.
But they are only partly right.
Some days I think I am its architect, and on other days, I suspect I am merely another resident.
It took me years to finally realise that this place had a name.
It’s called “The Mind Zoo."
Welcome to the mind zoo, where the gates open every morning before I wake and the animals are already awake. From the tugging on the heart’s string, I can certainly tell that some of these animals have been awake all night.
The first enclosure belongs to a creature that never sleeps. The keepers insist it does, but it silently whimpers like a wounded lion.
They say every animal sleeps eventually.
But honestly, I have simply never witnessed this animal take a break. Its ears twitch at sounds nobody else hears, and its eyes scan corners the other animals ignore.
It startles at footsteps that never arrive and often hears conversations long before they begin. If it had a sixth sense, I would say it's always alert, studying exits more carefully than entrances. Every presence and event is a ticking time bomb.
Visitors often mistake its constant vigilance for strength. They admire the way it never lets its guard down, but what they fail to notice is how tired it has become.
Beneath the strong shell is an animal that has convinced itself that if it stays awake long enough, nothing bad can happen. But it knows this, too, is a lie.
I've never seen Fear blink, and I often wonder what it thinks it sees that the other animals don't. A few seconds later, it gets up to check the fence again, as though expecting something terrible to happen while nobody is looking.
I have watched it make the same journey so many times, and what surprises me each time is that none of the other animals seems to react.
The name of this animal is FEAR.
In the next enclosure is Fear’s nearest neighbour, ANGER.
The two have lived beside each other for so long that visitors often mistake them for family, but their dispositions clearly differentiate them. Fear imagines danger, but Anger remembers it.
Unlike Fear, Anger rarely paces.
It sits very still.
Even the keepers have learned from experience not to mistake stillness for peace.
They once expected Anger to erupt without warning, so they learned to walk carefully around its enclosure, waiting for the kind of outburst that could send the whole zoo into mourning.
I used to think that Anger was the most dangerous animal in the zoo because it looked the part. I even learned to announce myself before getting too close, careful not to startle it.
Now I know better that Anger does not always shout. It simply lies in one corner, arms folded, remembering everything everyone else has tried to forget.
It was on a cold afternoon in June 2026, after sitting with Anger far longer than I intended, that I noticed something peculiar.
Anger wasn't sharpening its claws.
It was counting.
I never found out exactly what it was counting, but now and then it would stop, sigh quietly to itself, and begin again, as though afraid it had forgotten one.
Having watched this animal for years, I think Anger was born the day it realised the same story had simply learned to wear different faces.
The names changed.
The places changed.
The promises even sounded different.
Yet the ending always knew the way home.
I have watched Hope walk into its enclosure carrying flowers, insisting this time would be different. I have watched Trust unlock the gate because everyone deserves another chance. I have also watched Love quietly unpack itself in places that looked safe enough to stay.
Then, almost without warning, Anger would rise from the corner. Somehow, it recognised the footsteps before anyone else did.
It had become fluent in patterns.
I've often wondered why Anger lives beside Fear. Surely they should have been separated years ago. Then that afternoon, I noticed something I had missed.
Each time Fear hears a noise in the distance, it looks towards Anger.
Fear does not ask Anger to predict the future; it just asks Anger to remember the past. They often sit together for hours without speaking. Silence, I have discovered, is another language they both understand.
The silence lingers longer than most conversations. It is usually then that MEMORY arrives. Memory has terrible manners.
Unlike the others, Memory has no enclosure.
Just when the zoo begins to settle, it wanders in, carrying another yesterday in its palm, placing it wherever tomorrow was beginning to make itself comfortable.
I have often thought of visiting Hope after leaving Anger's enclosure. Strangely enough, I almost never get there as Memory always finds me first.
For many years, I searched for a plaque that says Memory.
But I never found one.
I was even convinced that I had overlooked it.
Then something struck me: Memory belongs everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Some mornings, Memory follows Anger around like an old friend, calmly placing yesterday’s troubles into today's hands.
Hope is never pleased to see it, and Trust becomes cautious whenever it appears.
Love, on the other side of the mind zoo, listens longer than it should.
One thing I have observed is that Memory has no respect for boundaries. It walks freely from one enclosure to another carrying pieces of lives that no longer exist exactly as they once did.
It often steals a feather from Hope, borrows a scar from Love. I can swear that I have seen it slip another stone into Anger's pocket before gently disappearing again.
I have accused Memory of stealing more things than other animals in the zoo combined, but it insists it is only returning them.
Memory is the reason none of the animals ever becomes entirely new. Just when Fear begins to rest, memory clears its throat. And when Trust reaches for another hand, Memory calmly asks whether it recognises the fingerprints.
Not far from Anger's enclosure lives the busiest animal in the entire zoo.
Its name is TRUST.
If Fear is the night watchman and Anger the keeper of old stories, then Trust is the gatekeeper.
Watching Trust long enough, I realised how tirelessly it worked. It walks from gate to gate, pressing gently against each latch, making sure every hinge still remembers how to open.
Sometimes it places its hand on the latch and simply stands there.
Minutes pass.
The visitor waits patiently on the other side. Even the birds seem to grow impatient. But Trust never hurries.
That is usually when Memory appears.
Memory never announces itself. It simply slips another key into Trust's hand.
"This one looked promising, too," it whispers.
Trust turns the old key over in its palm for a long time before placing it gently back into Memory's hands. Neither of them says another word.
From across the path, Fear has already stopped pacing. It isn't watching the visitor. It is watching Trust.
"Must you open it?" Fear asks.
Trust doesn't answer immediately.
It keeps looking beyond the gate as though trying to separate the person standing outside from all the people who came before them.
Hope, however, has wandered over carrying fresh flowers again. Hope has a habit of believing every beginning deserves the dignity of not being mistaken for the ending before it.
I envy Hope, and I think Trust does too.
I used to think Trust's job was to keep danger out, but I have come to realise that it does more than that.
Trust has simply become expensive; that’s why it hesitates. It questions whether this has come to build a home or merely leave another scar.
Every day, I set out to visit one animal only to arrive at another. The zoo has never cared much for my plans.
I look around and see yet another creature in the Zoo where it doesn’t belong. Far in the shadows, I see DISAPPOINTMENT creeping in through Trust's gate.
"Oh... not again," I whisper silently, feeling something inside me grow a little quieter.
Disappointment never asks for permission to enter; it simply waits until Trust has gathered enough courage to open the gate for something beautiful. Then, it follows closely behind.
Disappointment stays long enough to rearrange the residents, then leaves, but its footprints remain long after it's gone.
How I hate disappointment.
It’s such an unwelcome visitor.
It arrives in place of a dream that looked certain. A country I looked forward to calling my home. It borrows the voice of someone who promised to stay and strolls in casually with an eviction notice.
The cruellest thing is that disappointment doesn’t only break the heart. It slowly teaches the other animals to lower their expectations before life has had the chance to speak.
As for me, I no longer greet Disappointment with the surprise. Of course, we have met so many times that there is no need for introductions.
Disappointment is an unwelcome yet familiar guest.
But the thing about unwelcome visitors is that they take a piece of the zoo when they leave, forcing the zoo to live differently afterwards.
I didn't learn the lessons at first, but now I see that Disappointment steals the innocence of expecting good things to arrive without questioning how long they will stay.
The zoo expects to see Disappointment at every junction because it had learned the embarrassment of watering gardens that never bloomed.
It taught the zoo to be careful. To hesitate. And after enough visits, caution began dressing itself as wisdom.
Somewhere along the way, possibilities became memories of futures that had never happened.
One afternoon, while Disappointment paraded the grounds, the zoo became quieter.
The visitors still came and went, yet the whole zoo sounded farther away.
That was the first time I wandered into GRIEF.
The clocks inside Grief have never kept ordinary time.
Five minutes can become five years or six at it were, for the zoo.
With Grief, an entire year often disappears inside one conversation, and the nights have a habit of staying longer than they should.
I have learned never to look at my watch inside this part of the zoo. It always insists that less time has passed than my heart remembers.
Nothing seems eager to happen inside Grief. Even the paths look as though they have forgotten where they were leading.
I have sat on the same bench believing only a few minutes had passed, only to realise after two years that there are gallows left on the pathway.
Grief is so lonely that all the animals enter differently and leave differently. Even Anger, who never seems to run out of things to remember, forgets what it came to say.
Fear rarely stays for long, as there is little left for it to predict here. Only Memory behaves as though it has finally found somewhere familiar.
During those moments of silent ponderings with tears that never seemed to stop flowing, I began noticing something else. Something else was in the dark.
This voice sounded strangely familiar, though I could never remember seeing the one who owned it.
As I was about to leave, the voice spoke softly and calmly. It was SHAME.
It didn’t raise its voice. It simply asked, "What will people say?" I turned around, but there was nobody there.
The voice came again, saying, "You should have known." But Grief didn't answer. It simply lowered its eyes.
That was when I realised something I had missed all these years.
Shame doesn't have its own enclosure; it borrows everyone else's. However, the hardest days are when it borrows my own, and those are the days I no longer know who is speaking.
I was lost, but still I mustered the courage to walk from shame despite Grief tugging at what remains of the Zoo.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn't looking for anything. The truth is, there comes a point where survival becomes exhausting.
Honestly, I had stopped asking life to make sense, and I simply learned how to wake up inside it. Looking back now, I don't think CURIOSITY found me when life was going well.
It found me after everything I thought I understood came crashing down. When the dream I had for 4 years closed its doors, and the version of my life I had created vision boards for refused to happen.
Every morning, Curiosity squeezed through the same opening in the fence. By evening, it returned carrying something the zoo had forgotten existed.
I returned to writing while filling out applications for jobs I wasn't sure I would get and education programmes I wasn't sure I could afford.
I kept starting from ground zero, as I have done many times in the past.
I didn’t believe the next attempt would finally be the right one. Of course, Fear won’t let me believe, and Disappointment and Memory never stopped reminding me of years past.
Yet, something refused to believe that my story had already introduced all the chapters it was ever going to write.
It was then that I saw an animal I had overlooked all these while. It goes by the name Curiosity.
Many animals, I’m beginning to realise, didn't have enclosures. In fact, Curiosity was more of a visiting animal that wasn’t interested in staying inside the zoo.
It often stood beside a gap in the fence, staring towards a world none of the other animals seemed willing to notice.
Fear kept calling it reckless, and Anger dismissed it as naïve. Yet in the evenings, Curiosity returned carrying something none of the others ever brought back.
It carried possibility, and I had almost walked past it.
After everything the zoo had shown me, I wasn't expecting to discover anything new. Curiosity had wandered ahead as it usually did, disappearing through another opening in the fence. I followed slowly, more out of habit than expectation, and HOPE was there, waiting.
For a long time, I thought Hope was the easiest animal to recognise. Maybe that is why I kept missing it. I was always looking for a loud animal, something that would arrive with enough certainty to silence the rest of the zoo.
But Hope was none of that.
Instead, I kept finding it in small things. It led me to a budding seed which I had never noticed before. I also found fresh footprints on a path I didn't know existed.
Only then did I start to pay close attention.
Some mornings, before Fear wakes everyone else, I find Hope already awake. It moves quietly through the zoo, straightening what yesterday left undone.
Hope closes the gates, Trust forgot to latch, and returns stones that Anger left in the middle of the path. It sits beside Grief without asking it to leave, and when Memory drops another yesterday at Fear's feet, Hope never argues with it.
Sometimes Hope leaves a cup of water outside Grief's enclosure before anyone else is awake. For years, I searched for miracles until I realised that Hope had been reminding me that another day was worth surviving.
As the days slowly crawled along, I finally understood that if I followed the path Hope created, I would eventually encounter JOY.
For reasons I still don't fully understand, I expected Joy to be louder. I imagined Joy disrupting the echo systems of the zoo. I think I expected music, celebration or something extraordinary.
To be honest, I was a little disappointed when I found the smallest animal I had ever seen. Joy occupied the small spaces the others kept overlooking.
In fact, Fear walked past it in the mornings, and Anger never acknowledged it. Memory, on the other hand, was forever too distracted to notice it had grown a little overnight.
Even I had mistaken its silence for absence, and honestly, I never thought I would meet Joy.
I had spent far too many years wandering between Fear, Anger, Disappointment and Grief to believe there was still room for Joy.
Yet every now and then, Joy would find me.
It found me on afternoons when a sentence finally sounded the way my heart had been trying to say it all along. It found me standing before a blank canvas, convinced that colours sometimes understand what words cannot.
It found me in the laughter I shared with the family and friends who never gave up on me. Joy found me in the conversations that asked nothing of me except to be present. Sometimes Joy would arrive so gently that I only recognised it after it had already gone.
That is the funny thing about Joy.
It never stayed long enough for me to hold on to it, but it always stayed long enough to remind me that it was real and that the day had not belonged entirely to sorrow.
One afternoon, I decided I would spend the whole day with Joy. But it noticed me coming long before I reached it.
By the time I arrived, the enclosure was empty.
I searched for it until evening.
The next morning, while I was no longer looking, something warm brushed against my hand.
Joy had returned.
She seems to believe she is something to stumble upon, never something to capture.
Joy had a habit of looking at me as though we had met before.
Not the woman I am today.
Another one.
The one I have not yet grown into.
Whenever it looks at me that way, I instinctively turn around, expecting to find someone standing behind me.
Joy has introduced me to a version of myself I have not met yet, and I do not know when I will eventually meet her.
Yet, Joy behaves as though it already has.
Sometimes I find Joy sitting quietly, watching her from a distance.
Naturally, I look too.
Joy walks through the zoo without rushing and stops to greet Fear before it begins its morning patrol.
She sits beside Anger long enough for it to forget what it was counting and listens to Memory's stories without allowing them to become today's headlines.
She waits beside Trust until the gate opens on its own.
Nothing about the zoo looks different. Yet somehow everything feels lighter whenever Joy is here.
I often wonder whether Joy is introducing me to my future. I ask myself if it has encountered parts of me I have not yet recognised.
I don't know when I will become the woman Joy keeps introducing me to.
Perhaps she is waiting somewhere ahead of me.
Or has she been growing inside me all along?
It took me almost my entire life to find the Keeper of the Mind Zoo.
I had always imagined the Keeper would be impossible to miss. Someone larger than the other residents. Someone who could quiet Fear with a glance, reason with Anger, comfort Grief, and finally persuade Shame to leave.
I spent years looking for that figure outside the zoo.
I searched in people.
In promises.
In places.
In futures I had carefully planned.
Whenever those things disappeared, I assumed the Keeper had disappeared with them.
Looking back, I realise I wasn't searching for a Keeper at all.
I was searching for LOVE.
It's painful to admit it, but Love had been here all along. I simply couldn't recognise it because I imagined it as something bright, effortless, and uncomplicated — a cheerful puppy bounding through the zoo, wagging its tail loudly enough to drown out every darker voice.
But Love was older than that, wiser than I had imagined, and quieter than I had ever thought possible.
It was only after sitting beneath the oldest tree in the zoo that I finally understood.
Love wasn't another resident.
Love was the Keeper.
Oh, my dear Love. How terribly I had misunderstood you.
I had spent years searching for another animal, never realising the Keeper had been quietly tending them all.
Finally meeting Love, I began to wonder whether I had misunderstood the entire zoo.
Fear stayed awake because it wanted me to survive, and Anger kept counting because it wanted me to stop bleeding from the same wound.
Trust hesitated because it knew what broken promises cost. Whereas Hope kept returning because it believed another morning deserved a chance.
Joy kept finding me because it refused to let sorrow become the only language spoken here.
Even Shame, in its own broken and misguided way, had spent years trying to protect the parts of me that still bruised easily.
None of them had ever been trying to destroy me. They had simply forgotten when to stop protecting me.
I spent years trying to free myself from the animals, but Love quietly wondered why I kept trying to escape myself.
For the first time...
I recognised the zoo.
And somehow...
it recognised me.
I had never been its prisoner.
I had always been its home.
