“Well, we come into the world and we’re influenced by our environment, our parents, strokes of fate, education and random experiences. Then at some point we say, ‘I am such-and-such,’ as if it’s something that can be taken for granted, but we just mean the surface, the primary self.” She sat down on my desk. “To find your true self you need to question everything you encountered at birth. And lose some of it, too, because often it’s only in pain that we discover what really belongs to us . . . It’s in the breaches that we recognize ourselves.”
