There are people for whom freedom is a value.
And there are people for whom it’s almost physiology.
Not an idea.
Not a political position.
Not a fine-sounding word.
The condition under which breathing is possible at all.
That, I think, is why Eren once landed in me so hard.
Not because I want to destroy the world.
That part is fine, thankfully.
But because I recognise the mechanism itself.
If a cage exists, the first urge is to understand how it’s built.
Then to open the door.
Then to tear the door off.
And on a bad day the question comes up of why keep the walls at all.
This is where it gets frightening.
Freedom as hunger
Most people can come to terms with limits.
Not necessarily because they’re weak.
Sometimes a limit is reasonable.
Work requires a schedule.
Family requires responsibility.
Society requires rules.
The body requires sleep.
Without form, freedom quickly turns into chaos.
But there’s another kind of limit.
When someone decides for you who you get to be.
Where you’re allowed to go.
What you’re allowed to want.
Which version of you counts as the correct one.
And that I’ve always taken much worse.
Disproportionately worse, probably, at times.
You can take away comfort.
You can take away money.
You can ruin a reputation.
A person somehow comes to terms with all of it.
But when someone tries to take away the inner right to say:
this is my life,
something else entirely wakes up inside.
Not a philosopher.
Not an engineer.
Not a grown, reasonable man capable of drawing up a risk table.
Something far older.
It can’t negotiate.
It can only tear the chain.
For a long time I thought that part was bad
Because it’s very inconvenient.
Christianity teaches humility.
Society likes manageability.
Work likes predictability.
A family needs a person who doesn’t detonate every time the world turns out to be imperfect.
And inside there’s an enormous figure that wants to say:
just show me where the chain is.
That’s what frightens me about Eren.
Not the rage itself.
Rage is fairly primitive.
What frightens me is the consistency.
Once you accept that freedom is an absolute good, it’s very easy to start treating any obstacle as an absolute evil.
And from there the arithmetic gets unpleasantly simple.
If a wall obstructs freedom, break the wall.
If a system builds walls, break the system.
If people support the system…
This is the point where a person needs a brake.
Not because freedom stopped being important.
Because a person matters more than your own idea of freedom.
The chain and the person holding it
One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn sits right here.
It’s very easy to confuse the mechanism with the person.
If you were humiliated, you want to punish whoever humiliated you.
If a system broke your life, you want to destroy the system together with everyone standing near it.
If you were cornered, the whole world consists for a few seconds of enemies and an exit.
That’s the logic of a wounded animal.
There’s truth in it.
And almost no discrimination.
For a long time I had to grow a different capacity inside:
to break the chain without necessarily breaking whoever happened to be next to it.
Sometimes a person really is guilty.
Sometimes very much so.
But strength only becomes strength when it can choose where to apply itself.
Otherwise it’s just the energy of an explosion.
Maybe that’s why I look softer than I am
From outside it’s sometimes funny.
Someone might see a calm bloke with a laptop, a cat, a family, bots, websites and a fairly peaceful life.
Nothing particularly threatening.
And that’s fine.
Because a significant part of my adult life seems to have gone into making strength not look like strength all the time.
Not because it isn’t there.
Because it doesn’t have to be demonstrated.
When a person is weak, they sometimes have to show their teeth.
When strength becomes internal, it becomes possible to talk calmly.
It turned out softness isn’t necessarily the opposite of rage.
Sometimes softness is its discipline.
This is where Eren ends for me
There’s a temptation to romanticise the person who goes all the way.
Very cinematic stuff.
No compromises.
No doubts.
Freedom or death.
The only problem is that the world isn’t made of symbols.
It’s made of specific people.
They have children.
Homes.
Fear.
Their own truth.
Sometimes utterly idiotic.
But still their own.
And when your freedom starts demanding someone else’s death, you have to ask the question rage hates:
then how are you different from the cage?
That’s where the line runs for me.
I want enough strength that nobody can make me their property.
But I don’t want to become strong enough that everyone else becomes mine.
That’s probably the adult version of the same rage.
It doesn’t disappear.
It gets a direction.
Stones on the hands
I once had a very strange inner image.
An enormous figure.
Red, as if covered in ash.
In chains.
It was tearing at them and roaring.
On its hands were roughly hewn stones with sharp edges, points facing outward.
I don’t know what that was.
I don’t want to declare it a revelation, a demon, an archetype or one more ready-made container the human mind likes to put things it doesn’t understand into.
But I remember the image.
And today it reads differently to me.
I used to see something frightening there.
Now I see strength that wasn’t allowed to exist for a long time.
It grew up inside a constraint.
So its first language became the destruction of constraint.
That’s logical.
But not sufficient.
Because one day the chain runs out.
And a much harder question appears:
what do you do with your hands when there’s nothing left to tear?
Build
That’s the answer I came to slowly.
The same strength can build.
Systems.
A home.
Work.
A product.
Freedom for others.
An environment a person doesn’t want to escape from.
You can spend a whole life at war with what once constrained you.
And then the constraint wins in a very strange way: it defines the direction of your movement forever.
Or you can one day stop proving to the wall that you’re stronger than the wall.
Just walk to where it isn’t.
And build something of your own.
Freedom shouldn’t be hungry
That, I think, is the main difference between freedom and escape.
Escape is still defined by the cage.
Freedom isn’t.
While I’m running from, my trajectory belongs to whatever I’m running from.
Real freedom starts a little later.
When a “towards” of your own appears.
Not to destroy someone else’s world.
To create a space where you don’t have to betray yourself.
And to give others the same right.
Even if they don’t choose you.
Even if they choose strangely.
Even if they get it wrong.
Because freedom you keep only for yourself turns into power very quickly.
Maybe that’s why Eren is frightening
Not because he’s alien to me.
The opposite.
Some things are most frightening precisely because they’re too understandable.
I understand the impulse:
if the world is built as a cage, break the world.
But now a different possibility interests me more:
if the world is built as a cage, build a place without one.
That takes less rage.
And far more strength.
Because a wall can sometimes be broken in a minute.
And not building it again around another person can take a whole life.