If your freedom depends on their destruction, then you are not free until they are destroyed, and you are watching them, waiting, still bound, still giving them the center of your attention, still letting the shape of your life be determined by them.

But to come only to stop being crushed is a completely different errand, and a liberating one, because it does not require anything of them at all.

It requires only that you get out from under the weight.

Whether they thrive or fall afterward becomes, genuinely, none of your concern; your freedom was accomplished the moment you stepped out from beneath them, and nothing they do next can add to it or take it away.

I did not need Roman ruined in order to be free.