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

“No one decides who you are but you.

And I am going to write down, in a record no one can touch, exactly what I see — which is a frightened, exhausted, and completely sound woman who has been lied about on paper.” For the first time since I’d woken in that clinic, I cried, and they were not the tears of the fragile bride Christian needed me to be.

They were the tears of someone who had just been seen.

She examined me thoroughly, documented everything, and when I asked her the only question that mattered — whether I would one day be able to stand in a courtroom and be believed — she did not hesitate.