"This village can be a gilded cage," the pastor said. She sat in my living room in the Swiss Alps, holding a mug of warm herbal tea. It had been an intense but liberating hour. I had been sharing my fifth step—a part of the recovery process—a kind of confession delving into one’s moral inventory, focusing on resentments, the causes, how we were affected, our part in each cause, and our fears. When I described my problem with living in the idyllic place I lived—as suffocating—she had made that statement.

Her words struck a chord bringing me back to childhood. When I was around four or five, I enjoyed exploring the rooms of the French castle where we had moved to a few years prior from the Swiss Alps when my parents separated....

A narrated essay from The Pressures of Privilege.
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