Love isn’t conditional,” Ruth said. “It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone—and always failing. You can’t love someone if you’… - Alex Michaelides

After all, everyone’s entitled to be the hero of their own story. So I must be permitted to be the hero of mine. Even though I’m not. I’m the villain.

I also learned, from a young age, that I did not walk on the ground—but on a narrow network of invisible ropes, suspended above the earth. I had to navigate them carefully, trying not to slip or fall. Certain aspects of my personality were offensive, it seemed. I had terrible secrets to hide—even I didn’t know what they were. My?

Freud’s writings about grief and loss. And he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or else you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia—and we call depression.