He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

And for a while it made me doubt everything, including myself — how could I have been so blind, what did it say about me that I hadn’t seen.

But I came, in time, to a different and kinder understanding, and it is one I offer now to anyone it might reach.

It does not say anything bad about you that you did not see through a con built by professionals to be unseeable.

My openness was not stupidity.

My trust was not weakness.

They were simply the raw materials a dishonest man chose to exploit, and the shame for that belongs entirely to him.

I loved sincerely.