There is no move inside it that wins.

If I stayed calm, they said I was seeing sense at last.

If I got upset, they said, there — look — she’s spiraling again.

My composure and my fear were read as the same symptom, just at different volumes, and either way the conclusion was fixed before I opened my mouth.

That is what it is to be worked on by more than one person at once: it is not an argument you are losing.

It is an argument built, from the ground up, so that you cannot win it, and the only way out is to stop playing — to stop trying to convince them, and start gathering, in silence, the one thing the loop cannot absorb.