The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom – it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear. If we cannot at least imagine we are free, we are living a life that is wrong for us.

He knows the mask of the patriarchy is abnormal and perverse, but it is useful to protect him from being wounded. At its most decorated, the mask is there to help him appear to be rational while he intimidates women, children and other men. Above all, it is there to protect him from the anxiety of failure in the eyes of other men.

They preferred the office or wherever they worked because they had more status than being a wife.

‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’

‘Everyone is the other and no one is himself.’

I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are. I am