You cannot be controlled by people whose approval you have stopped waiting for.

They had just, in front of two thousand witnesses, forfeited the last of their power over me, which had never been anything but my hope that they might change.

I have come to believe that this is the hidden mechanism of almost every kind of family captivity, and that no one ever explains it to the people trapped inside it, because the people who would have to explain it are the ones benefiting from the trap.

The thing that held me, all those years, was not fear.

My family did not frighten me; they were not violent, they did not threaten me, there were no locked doors.

What held me was something far more insidious and far harder to see, which was hope — the specific, patient, renewable hope that if I stayed, and tried, and was good, they would one day become the family I needed them to be.