The first kind is how you lose yourself.

The second kind is how you win.

I have thought about that difference more than almost anything else, because it is the difference between the woman on the foyer floor and the woman writing this, and they are the same person, and the only thing that changed between them was the reason she was hard to see.

For seven years I had been invisible in the way that erases you — vanishing into the background of my own life so completely that the people I lived among forgot I had edges, forgot I could be hurt, forgot, in the end, that I was there to hurt.

That invisibility had no power in it.

It was pure subtraction, a slow disappearing that left less of me every year.