———I want this short story, in which thousands of details are missing (but you can easily supplement it with your own), to show how the background in which we are born and grow influences us, penetrates into us. How what our parents live influences us, sets the vector and unconscious route of our lives. It’s not just parents, but an entire era that influences us, and it takes a lot, a lot of effort to see, to discover oneself in this stream, to find oneself and one’s own place, not set by someone, but the one that suits me.. .I’ll start from afar. The city where Maya is from is one of those cities where no matter how hard you try, you won’t get lost. There are not many streets, and there are still people of that old breed who are ready, if necessary, to put aside their important affairs and take you home if you are lost. Of course, there are fewer and fewer of them. The value of another person’s experiences, to the detriment of one’s own tasks, is now out of fashion and is called the contemptuous word “co-dependency”, which few people know what it means, but it’s definitely something that needs to be gotten rid of... “Co-dependent” to be I don’t want to, I don’t want to be “dependent”, I want to be autonomous, and this is often someone who doesn’t care about the misfortune of another. Let him figure it out for himself. This new, but also aging value - autonomy (now, it seems, the time is coming for longing for relationships and warmth after many years of “work” on autonomy) - has its own history. The same collapse of the Union, perestroika, sharply class inequality and total confusion from the lack of previous supports (a caring state with a predicted bright future suddenly collapsed, and a person, like one of millions of cogs built into this system, suddenly fell to the sidelines and froze in horror and misunderstanding of where he should go and why , and who he is. So this man tried for almost 30 years to recover from that feeling of being “on the sidelines.” He analyzed his entire path and experience as best he could, and he came to the conclusion that addiction is a problem for everything. You don’t have to if you don’t want to experience those feelings and find yourself in that situation. Autonomy is what should protect you from the horror and anxiety of loss, collapse, uncertainty. Not everyone managed to rebuild - some were terribly broken, and many were broken. They drank themselves to death, withdrew, isolated themselves, put their lives on pause, surrendered to the pressure of new times, new tasks. It’s not for nothing that I’m talking about this. Maya's story is the story of a girl born at the turn of the era. She had parents whose lives were divided into Before and After. Her parents were from there and found themselves cogs on the sidelines. It was she who needed to get her bearings, having received an ambivalent message from her parents, in one hand of which there was a flower of horror and the inability to rely on their experience, because they themselves had ceased to see value in it. On the other hand, there is a flower of hope that she will feel this new wind, ride it and take a place in society, from involvement in which (this is their daughter!) they will be washed away from the stigma of failures, get rid of shame and confusion, from all that still does it, keeps them as frozen cogs of those times. People who did not accept, were unable to accept the challenge of the new reality. They could not see what was valuable in them and had not gone away even with new times - their experience, some knowledge, interests, could not maintain self-respect. With the new wind, they crossed out their entire past life. They were reset to zero, as if they had never existed... Maya grew. There was a lot of ambivalence and ambiguity in her life. The lives of the parents were not even filled with ambivalence, but rather with multivalence - as I already wrote, and as it usually happens during periods of complex multiple crises - many different values, competing in meaning, were mixed simultaneously in their lives, they themselves were confused and could not decide HOW right and what they themselves should hold on to. Therefore, just in case, they did not praise her for her intelligence - but she was a smart, grasping girl with a good memory (they themselves were those intellectuals who now turned out to be useless to anyone