It is only this, the single true thing underneath the whole story: that no one, ever, has the right to grant you or withhold your place in the world, because your place was never theirs to give.

It is yours already.

It was yours before they arrived, and it will be yours after they are gone, and the very fact that someone is working so hard to make you doubt it is the surest proof of how much they fear the moment you stop.

You do not have to earn permission to occupy your own life.

You only have to remember that you never needed it — and then, in whatever way is actually open to you, walk out of the smaller room they built for you, into the whole wide life that was always, all along, your own.

The roses are blooming somewhere, waiting.

Go.