We've built a jail for ourselves, first engineered by the lies of false prophets, reinforced by the hate we were taught to inflict on our own selves, and guarded by pain that is only satisfied with unresolved hurt.
For all that she strips down emotionally on screen, it's what remains hidden and unvoiced that is most compelling - that corner of her self she guards so fiercely, even as the camera zooms in.
Richardson would introduce colleagues to his ferrets by name, ride at high speed on his powerful motor-bike in his seventies, have a parrot flying round his study eating his pencils, or take a pet mouse out for a stroll, but behind such unorthodox behaviour there was a closely guarded self who remained an enigma to even his closest colleagues.
Various previous presidents had affairs; one, François Mitterrand, kept a mistress and a daughter for years at the taxpayer's expense with media self-censorship guarding the information from the public for years.
Members of the protesters' "self-defence" militia guarded the grounds of Yanukovych's residence outside Kiev.
The charges are sharply at odds with the firm's jealously guarded self-image as a paragon of integrity.
Mark, 33, explained their consistency with a characteristic blend of sarcasm and guarded self-analysis: "We're trying to push the envelope of verit which sounds arty, indie and cool.
Eleanor was self-conscious and guarded, Lennie was shy and grieving – neither were the beautiful manic pixie dream-girls readers were used to; they were simply teenage girls in believable situations (even if exaggerated, they were still familiar).
The vision of siblings who share the same roof but live in self-enclosed, fiercely guarded private worlds suggests a clenched Irish reserve under which emotional volcanoes threaten to erupt.
In fact, she is the kind of character one often finds in the English writer Alan Bennett's work: a repressed, conventional woman about whom we are privileged to know more than she does herself, who will eventually perform acts that subvert her carefully guarded self-image.
And throughout our lives as we improve our skills, we seek to recapture the purity of who we were when able to love beyond our guarded selves.
