I will teach my son that the comfortable house i am giving him is not his paradise, it is mine, and that he cannot inherit a paradise. Adam did not lose eden, he was freed from it. a garden someone else planted is just a pleasant temple, and the man who grows old inside it dies as a guest. the world is full of sons who never left, who took the safe position, the warm approval, the easy chair, and who now in their forties sit at dinners speaking in the voices of their fathers . i pity them, but i will not let him become them. he must understand that the day when he does the thing that makes me angry, the thing that makes his mother cry, the thing that risks everything he has been handed, that day is his birth. i can only give him the exit, not the land. the land he must take with his own fear drenched hands. and i will make sure he knows that i would rather he be kicked out and build a leaky shack on his own ground than stay in my walled garden forever

Never let them see you heal. heal in private like an animal that crawls under the house to die, except you don't die. you come back out and they look at you and they can't figure it out. they saw you broken, now you are calm and it is terrifying to them, because they wanted to watch. they always want to watch. your bad year was their best entertainment. rob them of that. close the door. go silent. come back wrong. come back so quiet that the quiet itself makes them nervous. they will ask, are you okay? they don't want an answer, they want back in. don't let them in. you are not a season they can watch and rate. you are a door that closed