Finding Me: An Oprah's Book Club Pick

until a therapist a few years ago asked me, “Why are you trying to heal her? I think she was pretty tough. She survived.”

Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth.

At the age of twenty-eight, I woke up to the burning fact that my journey and everything I was doing with my life was about healing that eight-year-old girl.

I’ve always been an introvert, and when I was young, I was extremely shy. At an early age, I became a keen observer of the world around me. I blended into the wall in almost every setting, and I was able to see without saying a thing.

One of the beauties of getting older is really getting to know a parent.

He loved me. That I know. But his love and his demons were fighting for space within, and sometimes the demons won.

The final stretch to finding me would be allowing that eight-year-old girl in, actively inviting her into every moment of my current existence to experience the joy she so longed for, letting her taste what it means to feel truly alive. The destination is finding a home for her. A place of peace where the past does not envelop the Viola of NOW, whe

metastasized. It didn’t help that I was running back to a home where there was no protection.