I was always asked to mind less.

Her cruelty was treated as a fixed fact of nature, like weather, and my hurt was the variable — the thing that could and should be adjusted down.

Five years of that teaches you, slowly, without your noticing, that your own feelings are the problem in the room, that the loving, family-preserving thing is always for you to shrink a little more.

I had shrunk a great deal by the night of that dinner.

I just didn’t know yet how much, or that I was about to stop.

Chapter 3 — Serve Us Now