It never occurred to me that there must have been a number of losers that day. Future colleagues whom I would meet a long time later in a tour bus. That we would lightly trade back and forth the young people we once were, with laughter and distance.

Then I only had Grandma. By morning I was with her, and I cried my heart out. Sobbed on a breast which never had harbored the dream that now was crushed within me. In the span of a night everything that was customary and familiar had been stripped away, and I was in the middle of a transition. There was something to be learned from this, something hard to understand: that one carries one’s fate within oneself, one’s fate is not dependent on this kind of failure or success.

To become conscious is a long process, to become open to sorrow, look upon it as part of living, of developing, of changing.

A year in Oslo, where the first few months of loneliness are what I remember best. Where not being able enough, talented enough, was the big sorrow. Months that seemed endless, without any goal or meaning. Carefully jotted down in a blue diary that I still have, written by a young girl who lived long ago. Pains that I no longer recall, joys that are no longer a part of me.