It was, in the end, one thing, and only one: I found people, out in the wider world, away from my family, who saw me differently, who reflected back a version of myself that my family had never allowed to exist.

Julian was the largest of these, but not the only one.

And slowly, over years, the self other people could see began to feel more true than the version my family insisted on, until one night, in a fountain, they traded places for good, and the woman my family had invented simply dissolved, and the woman I truly was stood up out of the water.

You do not always defeat a lie about yourself from the inside, by sheer force of self-belief.