That is what children of people like mine do; we absorb their verdict on us, we internalize their voice, we come to see ourselves through their eyes, and their eyes had always found me wanting, dramatic, difficult, ungrateful, too much.

When they launched their campaign to destroy my reputation, they were only doing, in public and at scale, what they had done privately my whole life: telling the world who I was, and expecting the world, and me, to believe them.

And the deepest damage of that night in the alley was never the broken ribs, which healed.

It was the assault on my right to be the author of my own story, the attempt to make their version of me the official one, to erase my voice so thoroughly that even I might come to doubt it.

That is what abusers steal, in the end, more than money, more than safety: they steal your authorship of yourself.