Every time I was actually saved, it was because someone acted.

That is the single most important thing I learned from the whole ordeal, and it overturned a belief I had been raised inside so completely that I had never once thought to question it.

I had been taught, as so many women are taught, that endurance is a virtue — that the strong woman is the one who bears things, who holds the family together through her own quiet suffering, who does not complain, who keeps the peace at any cost to herself.

I had built my entire identity on that idea.