Refusal to Despair

Anais Nin:

"It's almost like the man who goes to the bottom of the ocean and takes with him some oxygen to equalize the pressure. I'm talking about equalizing the pressure between outer actions and events which are shattering and devastating to us and then the place where we recompose and reconstruct ourselves, where we finally achieve what Jung called the second birth. The second birth we are entirely responsible for; it's a self-creation. This second birth is the one that you can make, and the discovery of that to me was always a great relief..."

From A Woman Speaks (Chapter 2: Refusal to Despair) 1982