“Be good and you will be lonesome.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Funny that my parents didn’t tell me that being lonely and feeling cheated was a consequence of the rules they laid out for me.  But it was where I ended up.  I, like many women before and after me, tried to be perfect.  The bar for us, you see, is set at perfection, and if I was anything less (and I always was), it meant I was bad.  I was constantly striving, putting myself second, wanting to at least seem what I wanted to be.

I ingested the rules and they became part of me.  The age when I did this was pretty young, because the childlike equation I had in my head was clearly something straight out of a fairy tale:  Following the rules = happiness.  I thought somehow that rules were made by wise people who knew best, and didn’t realize until way late that most of them are just a form of mob rule.