“I'd assumed that once I'd passed the age of twenty, I'd gained the power to do everything alone. But I'd been wrong about that, and this just brought it home to me, again, that I still had a long way to go. The sense of failure, however, was a strangely comfortable one-- the feeling of looking up and starting over again after pride and defensiveness had slipped away, and left me soft and crumpled on the ground.”