-- from "A Wolf at the Table" by Augusten Burroughs

I'm reading A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs. It is more serious than his earlier work, a dark memoir about his sick childhood and forbidding father. It's painful to read and triggers my instinct to psychically wrap my arms around anyone in pain and shield them from the collective hurt of people hurting people.

Here's a quote from the book that I wanted to share because it gives a ray of hope on a desolate situation. His twelve-year old self says:

I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind -- an emptiness -- a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn't need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it.

Maybe, I thought, I don't need a father to be happy. Maybe what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what's missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be.

This really struck me. The years in front of you belong to no one but you. Maybe I can learn to fly someday afterall.