Response to a FB Post

"They got it right,when they said,women were nothing without their men..for we are moulded and shaped and touched and carved by the different men,who dot the landscape at different points in our lives..their adoration touches us,their naievete tickles us and the heartaches they cause,makes us tougher..and we find strength in tears,and softness in strength..and realise it is alright not to want to stand alone all the time,and also,to stand alone does not mean we are always wrong..and the secret is as simple as to laugh as much as one can,to cry,and to feel,and to giggle and to ache..to live as much as possible,in one lifetime..make it one glorious blur..for at the end,like a wise guy somehwere said,we are indeed the sum of all our experiences.."
-Friend on FB

Response:

That works both ways. It is dangerously one-sided, and to a large extent, either naive or oversimple. Doesn't it work both ways? I would use the word people- the people (meaning the men or the women-as the case may be) who touched us. The people who had us waking in our dreams, and from our dreams; the people from whom we waited awake while we dreamed, the people who put reality to sleep, while they were busy jolting our reality- those who shook the foundation from under us, while really becoming the foundation of what we became in future.

Time might as well be a metaphor- in so far as these people are concerned- for mostly they never go away. Geographies cannot separate, nor can chronologies differentiate, sometimes some people just make us give up. It sounds too romanticized, but is not- applies equally well to people we love or those we hate. They all shape us...as you say...our experiences. It is not always bright, it is not always that which sheds the maximum light, it is not always people we personally want with us, or wish wanted us with them. It is nothing personal, as far as people are concerned, even though it is everybit as personal as personal gets. But in the end, people are people. What matters is us, who let people get rights on ourselves that even we do not possess.

 It, sometimes, is like voluntary captivity. Yet, every morning, we wake up, brand new-almost like we are unwrapping the sun from its box-bright and shiny. And then we let go through the rest of the day, like every day is a lifetime, burning in the bright light of the gift we have unleashed, each one of us our own Prometheus grimacing our own burnished smiles under the very fires we stole from our own personal Olympus, and gave to them- mixing a lot of metaphors, every morning, we are gods who fell on our own swords. We think we are getting wiser, we think we have found a way. When all that is true is that we have lost it, and are just running around in circles like hamsters in a wheel. Man or woman. We are our own prisoners.