Facing the world as a single woman seemed like the biggest failure in life. It pains me that I’m looking at doing this now. It connects to all kinds of things in my life, ways I could never stand on my own. The downside of a happy marriage is you get to coast. But if one of you dies, the other’s still coasting.

thinking. By stepping onto the banks of awareness, we create a half-inch of distance between the story and the part of consciousness that is watching the flow. This is how transformation happens, because we are acknowledging a part of us that is always and forever free.

In the years since that time, Toni had come to believe that her birth was part of a cosmic plan in which her soul chose to incarnate to take her brother’s place, and that it was a blessing to be given this healing mission. Toni wrote, “I have always welcomed the opportunity to serve.”

Simply acknowledging the limitations of your self-image, and the falsehoods it contains, allows you to step outside that image and look around at what is true. When you do this, you realize that these true qualities have been with you all this time, hidden by a kind of shadow.

one. Many writers begin this way, turning inward as children to look for answers they can’t find around them.

We fight off what we most desire in confusing, detrimental ways that often keep us in bondage to fear. This self-sabotage makes no rational sense. Why would anyone be afraid of success or freedom?

Like nature, the mind hates a vacuum, so when facts are unavailable the imagination reflexively fills in the blanks. What determines the sturdiness of your narrative structure is how you fill in these memory gaps.

It’s not necessary to share your secrets with others, like Antoinette did. What matters is that you admit them to yourself,

It’s a case of the “the devil you know”—I know what it’s like to be strangled; I don’t know what it’s like to be free.