My family had taught me to see my scars the way they needed me to see them, as a disfigurement, a spoiling, a flaw in the family picture.

And because your body is the one thing you can never step away from, that lesson went deeper than any other, until I could not so much as catch sight of my own shoulder in a mirror without a small reflexive flinch of shame, a shame that had been installed so early and so thoroughly that it felt like my own.

Reclaiming my mind from my family took months.

Reclaiming my body took far longer, because the shame lived not in my thoughts, where I could argue with it, but in my flesh, where it simply was.