It doesn’t make headlines.
But it was the realest work I have ever done.
It happened in small, unglamorous increments.
The first time I caught my own reflection and didn’t silently catalog a flaw.
The first time I made a plan for myself a year out, which meant I had started to believe I’d have a year.
The first time I said the words it was never my fault out loud, alone, in my own kitchen, and heard how strange and true they sounded.
For four years a man had held a false report between us like a mirror and told me it was my reflection.
Learning to look away from that mirror — to trust my own eyes over the image he’d painted — was not a single triumphant moment.
It was a thousand small refusals to pick the mirror back up.
Some days I still have to make that refusal.