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“I’ve always known I was a duck,” she said, “but I’ve spent my whole life being told I was a chicken. Every time I try to say ‘quack’ the world tells me that I have to say ‘cluck.’ I even started believing that I was a chicken and not a duck. Then we started hanging out and I found somebody else who quacked. And that’s when I thought: To hell with them, I really am a duck!”
“If we can just get one per cent of empathy towards Draco,” he said, “we’ll have succeeded. Remember that you’re planning to do the worst thing that’s ever happened in the wizarding world: kill Dumbledore.
Draco Malfoy was the boy who had no choice. Dominated by his overbearing father, coerced by the Death Eaters, cowed into fear of his life by Voldemort, his actions were not his own. They were the actions of a boy whose agency has been ripped from him. He could not make his own decisions, and the turn his life had taken terrified him.
“Tom,” he said, “I don’t know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I’ve been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don’t be the twelfth.”
I can honestly say it was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. But the very fact that I was able to admit to myself that I needed some help—and I was going to do something about it—was an important moment.
It’s easy to bask in the sun, not so easy to enjoy the rain. But one can’t exist without the other. The weather always changes. Feelings of sadness and happiness deserve equal mental screen time.
The only true currency we have in life is the effect we have on those around us.
“You’re the guy from Malcolm in the Middle, right?”
you haven’t done anything yet. You’re only just getting started. Chapter one may be over, but let’s not look back, let’s look forward. Let’s move on to the next thing, Tom, because the best is yet to come.
