Every transition to a new stage is paid for by a crisis.
One way or another.
Originality is paid for with shame.
Leaving co-dependence — with rupture.
Birth — with pain.
Closeness — with compromises.
Freedom — with loneliness.
And so on.
Everything has its price.
If a person stays too long in a role that has already exhausted itself, he begins to slide quietly toward emotional bankruptcy.
He no longer has strength.
No motives.
No interest.
No inner fire.
He continues to move, speak and perform familiar actions, but inside, his role has long since become empty clothing which, for some reason, he still wears.
There are many such people around.
Mothers speaking to teenagers as if they were two-year-olds.
Directors who have long stopped caring about reports.
Thirty-year-old nymphets.
Eternal students.
Respectable husbands who have long died inside their own respectability.
Truth-tellers with bare backsides.
Rescuers who themselves should be carried out of the fire.
And a darkness of other characters, each with his own line, his own pose and his own way of not entering the next stage.
The longer you stay in an exhausted role, the more you become a character.
All his lines are predictable.
All his steps are scripted.
All his reactions are known in advance.
Directors go bankrupt.
Nymphets seduce.
Mothers accuse.
Truth-tellers cut.
Rescuers rescue.
Victims suffer as if it were no longer pain, but a profession.
And all this can last for years.
Because the old role, even dead, still seems safer than the unknown.
What else can be said here?
One ought to draw a moral at the end, but there is no truth in that when your own crisis stands before your face like a large dark-water lake into which you must dive entirely, not knowing whether you have enough air.
To be ready to drown without ever touching the bottom.
Or to break through it with your own head and come out on the other side.
To be ready for your own unreadiness.
People entering crisis often have the illusion that they will be able to keep life unchanged.
The same connections.
The same face.
The same level.
The same image of themselves.
The same convenient legend about who they are.
But crisis always means change.
First of all, the change of what is hardest to change.
Otherwise it would not be a crisis.
Sooner or later, one will have to enter it.
Because while you hesitate on the shore, you are paying anyway.
With your time.
With your strength.
With your interest.
With your aliveness.
And, in the end, with your own life.
One way or another...
