It is a satisfying shape for a story.

It is just not what happened to me, and I have come to think the gap between the story they wanted and the truth I lived is worth naming, because it points at something people get wrong about being wronged.

Revenge and freedom feel, from a distance, like they should be the same thing — as though the way to become free of the people who hurt you is to defeat them, to make them suffer, to win.

But they are not the same thing at all, and in some ways they are opposites, because revenge keeps your attention fixed on the people who hurt you, keeps them at the center of your life even in their downfall, keeps you measuring your own peace against their pain.