It never worked, not once, because the role was not about me — it was about what my father needed me to be so that his own economy of approval could function, and no achievement of mine could revise a verdict that served a purpose entirely unrelated to my actual qualities.

You cannot reason a person out of a belief about you that they hold because they need it, not because it is true.

And so the way out was never to win the argument inside the room.

It was to leave the room.

To go and build a life among people whose sight was not distorted by a need to keep me small, and to let their clearer reflection slowly overwrite the warped one I had grown up inside.

It took years.