I will make my way through the maze either way, but will I learn less if I walk it clinging to that thread already laid there to take me out? Would a woman dare let go? Would a hero?

If they set me on a lonely island, if they change my story and refigure my face, what of it? In deviation begins liberation, it is always from the unexpected that the most miraculous course reveals itself.

I have seen too many women, paralyzed by the fear of ever once appearing different, mold themselves into precise china dolls. And in the porcelain pulse of their lives the heart becomes a frozen captive, spirit seizes up, unaccustomed to so much regulation, and life itself becomes sustained on the smallest possible motions of the breath...

Give me instead the castle of aberration to dance through, the temple of unorthodoxy to make my home in. Better to trust in the unusual, better by a million times to embrace the unexpected and discover in its reflection the delightful idiosyncrasies of the self, the truest map to the labyrinths within...
• by Anne Markel