She’d given up trying to achieve perfect virtue on her own. She’d realized how exhausting, how inhuman and wrong it was to live enslaved by this goal. Now that she was aware of her overwhelming imperfection, her fragility and contingency, she no longer bore the burden of the hammer and the chisel on her back. It wasn’t that she’d accepted imperfection, or grown accustomed to it, but she no longer carried the load alone, she no longer shouldered the yoke with only her own strength, she was no longer shocked when she struck a bad patch. She also knew that none of this would last, that after the
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