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 against that, one honest woman with a clipboard was worth more than any amount of my own conviction, because she was outside the story he’d built, and she looked at me and said, plainly, on the record, that I was sound.

I cannot overstate what that did.

It was not that she gave me strength I didn’t have; it was that she gave me back the strength he had spent a year taking, by being the first person in a very long time to reflect my own reality back to me undistorted.

Everyone caught in this particular kind of harm needs a Dr.

Pratt — one person, outside the fog, who will say the true thing out loud.