That is the trap that holds so many people inside situations they experience as inescapable: not that they lack the power to leave or to stop or to refuse, but that using that power would require a confrontation they dread more than they dread the ongoing harm, and so they tell themselves, year after year, that they have no choice — when the truth is that they have always had the choice, and have simply been paying, in silence, to avoid the discomfort of making it.

The morning of my divorce, I finally made it.

One click.

And the entire structure of my supposed powerlessness collapsed in an instant, revealing itself to have been, all along, nothing but a decision I had been too afraid to make.

I was never trapped.

I had only been unwilling, for eight years, to be the woman who says no.

It cost me one click to become her.