”Isn't it great that we can create our own space, our own new worlds,” I said to Templeton without thinking about what it really meant. I guess that thought came to me because I’m reading The Hours and am in a Mrs. Brown chapter. The first Mrs. Brown chapter to be exact. She doesn’t feel like she can create her own new world, so instead she reads one. I feel bad for her.

My great grandmother had 21 children. She never lived in her own space. She never got a world of her own where she could read and think. Hell, I’m sure she never even learned to read. I am feeling this amazing freedom today. I can choose my fate and my reality. It’s like believing my own advertising. Like writing my own marketing plan. Write it and it is true. That really is the answer to life. Life is like marketing. Write it well, learn it well, feel it well and it will be true. Think you are a happy person, well there you are, oh so happy. Think you are beautiful, smart, competent. Amazing, there you are, beautiful, smart, competent. Easy. But I know it isn’t that easy, at least it isn’t when you are depressed or sick or whatever. But it can be, just try it.

I remember the first moment that I felt truly self-aware. I was 8 years old. I gazed at my reflection in window of my dad’s car. I was in the back seat. I saw myself and wondered who I was looking at. That wasn’t me, that couldn’t be me, I was a serious person, this was a child looking at me. Who was I? How did I know these people, my family? Who were they in relation to me? Then there was this moment of clarity. A blast of cold air from the car’s air conditioning made me close my eyes so briefly. And when I opened them, I saw myself clearly. I have these moments more and more now; when I touch the reflection and know my place and my truth.

I am Mrs. Dalloway. I used to be Mrs. Brown, wishing I was Mrs. Woolf. But now I am Mrs. Dalloway, buying flowers and enjoying the weather. And it doesn’t matter what happens later in the book, because I can choose to stay here. I can create my own space.