Trauma, Growth, and How to Be Twice as Alive: Tove Jansson on the Worm and the Art of Self-Renewal

“Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.”

There are experiences in life that strike at the center of our being, sundering us in half with unforeseen pain for which we were entirely unbraced. Because we know that this is possible — from the lives of others, from our own past experience, from the history of the heart recorded in our literature — we are always living with the awareness, conscious or unconscious, that life can sunder us at any given point without warn...