The day I understood this was the day I stopped trying to be seen by them, because I finally grasped that being seen accurately was not something they were withholding out of ignorance, to be corrected.

It was something they were refusing, out of need, and could not be argued into.

You cannot reason a person out of a belief about you that they are not holding for reasons of truth.

So I stopped reasoning.

I stopped presenting my case.

And I sat down at Table 21 and simply let them keep their comfortable story a little while longer, until the night it would, publicly and permanently, shatter under the weight of the reality they’d committed themselves to ignoring.

Chapter 5 — The Toast