It was not remotely the truth.

But I had learned, long before, that there was no point in correcting my parents’ picture of me, because they were not looking at the real me at all.

They were looking at a convenient fiction, the fragile, disappointing daughter, and every quiet thing I did merely confirmed the fiction in their eyes.

So I stopped trying to correct it.

And that, it turned out, was the most useful thing I ever did, because a person the world has decided to underestimate is a person the world stops watching.