Compliance is the opposite.

Compliance is surrender dressed up as virtue, the passive absorption of harm not because you have chosen it but because you are afraid of what refusing it would cost.

For three years I had called myself patient, and I had not been patient at all.

I had been compliant.

I had been giving in, again and again, and congratulating myself on my forbearance, when what I was actually doing was teaching three people that there was no limit to what they could take from me, because I would never make them stop.

My patience was a fiction I told to make my cowardice bearable.