I have thought about that phrase, my own voice, and about how the whole of my story can be told through what happened to my voice, because it is, in the end, the truest thread running through all of it.

When I married Julian, I had a voice; I had a career, and opinions, and a self that spoke.

And over three years, slowly, that voice was taken from me, or rather I gave it away, piece by piece, in the way that a certain kind of marriage teaches a woman to do: I stopped speaking up, stopped disagreeing, stopped taking up space, learned to keep the peace by keeping quiet, until the confident woman I had been dwindled into an agreeable shadow who existed to reflect a powerful man back to himself.

That silencing was the real violence of my marriage, long before the knife; the knife only made literal what had been happening for years.