To you, Warren.

Sometimes people avoid the beginnings because they want to avoid the endings. This is particularly true if we have negative associations with happiness. If we have had the carpet pulled out from under us at moments of great vulnerability, we may prefer to avoid life altogether. But what is life without beginnings? And what is life without endings? Life is lived in the spaces between. We must begin again, time and again, if we are going to live a real life. - Jeff Brown

It took me years to understand the impact of being scapegoated in my childhood home. To survive it, I armored up, muscling my way across the family battleground to safety. But safety didn’t mean that the patterns subsided- in fact, the internalized remnants of being ‘the one to blame’ became more evident later in life. Being the scapegoat was manifest in many intertwined tendencies: self-shaming, self-hatred, feeling unwelcome in my own body, vicarious justice-seeking (criminal defense lawyer), feeling responsible for things that happened to those I knew- ‘I should have saved them’ - and sometimes, even for things that happened to strangers. Being blamed for the lives of others is a tremendous burden, difficult to shed. If you carry this weight, devote real time to looking at how it interferes with your daily life, your faith in yourself, the choices you make. Call out those who blamed you in the past- no child can be responsible for an adult's misery- and boundary those who continue to scapegoat you. We are all entitled to feel worthy of our time here. - Jeff Brown