It is subtler and it goes deeper.

It is the slow erosion of your own belief that you are real — that your labor is real, your exhaustion is real, your inner life is a thing that exists and matters and takes up space in the world.

When you cook a thousand meals that are eaten without a word, and change a thousand sheets that are soiled again by morning, and sit through a thousand nights that no one else even knows were hard, you begin, without deciding to, to disappear to yourself.

You become the background of other people’s lives, the reliable functioning of the house, the thing that is only noticed when it fails.

I had become, over twenty years, a kind of household utility — present, essential, and completely invisible, the way the plumbing is invisible until it breaks.

And the cruelest part is that I had come to accept it.