By Lida Prypchan
It was when he was thirty-two that he realized he had been a captive for his entire life. To reach that conclusion he had taken every experience into consideration, from the most noble and tender to the most cruel and unjust. For him it was a somber and significant realization, perhaps the most important in his life, because from that moment on his way of thinking was going to change. It wasn’t a question of pessimism. Neither was it a reality. It was a simple fact about himself which he accepted and which enabled him to adapt his life to what he had learnt from this realization. He said it was neither pessimism nor reality, because these were merely words others repeated, and what was real for others was not so for him. Those words were more than designation that limited a person, rather than expressed his reality. That’s why his reality was indescribable and even incomprehensible to anyone else and sometimes even to himself.
He didn’t believe in free will. You act and think according to what society, the family and other institutions dictate. Liberty is extremely relative. Too many mechanisms tie you down to a group and if you attempt to overstep the boundary, bang! You’re criticized, fingers begin to point, you get a bad reputation, old-fashioned lectures, nasty looks, sad sighs from loved ones who “understand you” – then off to jail with those who are truly sincere, or whose face is an insult to human physiognomy. Well, he always was a rare bird. It was not the way he looked. It was the many little things that made him different from the rest. And because he had studied psychology, he knew that it is very important for a human being to feel approval and support, to feel important and loved. Nobody felt this for him and this was perhaps what made him most proud. He was a captive even of this – a captive of pride in his own self-confidence.
Sometimes he would get lost in thoughts about himself and proudly caress his great conclusion. He would say to himself, “At first I was a captive of my inability to handle my own affairs and my ignorance. My well-meaning parents gave me tender loving care and, perhaps without realizing it, taught me to be a lifelong captive of their decisions and opinions, in other words of their way of thinking. Then at school they made me a captive of a stranger whom I had to call teacher. She in turn, poor thing, was my captive because her patience and state of mind were in my hands. Sometimes I pestered her just so she would realize we were both captive and stop trying to turn me into an educated child because I was a captive of my rebellious nature and had no interest in learning. If she bothered me enough and pressed me to learn, I would start to cry to make it quite clear that she was also a captive of my tears and of my own compassion. After my first kiss I became a captive of kisses. When I had my first encounter with sex, certainly not one involving love, I was forever caught in the clutches of pleasure. Then, after experiencing sex when I was in love, I become a willing captive in prison of love, where I shut myself in of my own free will whenever I want to share beautiful moments and be happy. Later, I learned about friendship and became the captive of my friend, that someone special I could count on unconditionally.
Then when I got a job, I saw the hours go slowly by s I did what was expected, what was correct for others and wrong for me. I thereby became a captive of my silence, of what I was forbidden to express, my secrets, and my opinions that were different from other people.
Then I got married and my children appropriated my jail. I educated them so they wouldn’t be tied down to me, so they could decide for themselves what they would be captives of. At least I can boast that I didn’t make them follow the ogre duty. I like the fact that they’ve retained their spontaneity. Now they hold me captive: my life and decisions depend on them. To tell the truth this has its pros and cons. The pros: they have given me great happiness; they have taught me tenderness again; they have taught me not to criticize my parents, but rather, to understand them; they have taught me what duty really is; they have taught me a lesson about love. The cons are always the same: they have taken away the little freedom I had; they have kept me from returning to my studies; they have tied me to my wife, at a time when I had just noticed that we were more like brother and sister, at a time when we would look at each other and all we could see was how weary we’d become. Finally …all I know is that regardless of whether I’m happy or sad, I am my own captive and, best of all, a captive without a jail.
