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

That mismatch was the crack that brought the whole thing down.

Because you can lie about a person in the abstract, on paper, in a file.

It is much harder to make a lie survive contact with the actual person, speaking for herself, sounding exactly like what she is.

He had spent so long telling everyone I could not be trusted to speak for myself that the simple act of my speaking, competently, became the most devastating rebuttal possible.

I did not have to argue that I was sound.