“You couldn’t imagine that I was just working hard, and giving my money away, to people who despised me for it.”

That exchange with Karla, more than anything else, showed me the completeness of my own erasure.

Because think about what her assumption revealed.

My family had watched me pay for groceries, and internet, and medication, and a mortgage, for years.

They had watched me give and give and give.

And rather than conclude the obvious thing, that I was a generous person sacrificing for a family that took me for granted, they had constructed an entirely different explanation: that I must be secretly rich, that I had some hidden fortune, that the giving cost me nothing and therefore meant nothing and therefore required no gratitude.

It was the only explanation their worldview could accommodate.