Made me stop and think, although I’m not sure about taking advice from a therapist who name-drops.
I remember one night, after Atlas was published, she [Ayn Rand] was sitting on the sofa, crying, protesting the state of the world and her place in it, and then she said how much she would hate for John Galt to see her this way, how much she would hate for him to see her miserable or in tears. I said, “Why? Wasn’t this part of the battle? Wasn’t feeling like hell and then picking yourself up and carrying on part of what made the struggle heroic? What was there to be ashamed of? Why did one have to pretend that there were never moments of utter despair? Wasn’t the challenge to experience them, own them, admit them, without denial or pretense ‹ and then go on fighting?” I said we should be proudly willing to let people see us in our darkest moments because in the end it was not going to be our darkest moments that would define us.
– Nathaniel Branden
