The therapy was slower and less satisfying than the legal work, and for a long time I resented it for that.

In the courtroom, effort produced results you could see — an order, a filing, a plea.

In the therapist’s office, I would do the work and do the work and feel, for weeks, like nothing was moving at all.

She told me, early on, that this was the difference between justice and healing: justice is something you do to the world, and healing is something you allow to happen in yourself, and the second is harder precisely because you cannot force it the way you can force a case forward.

I did not want to hear that.

I had built my whole survival on the ability to force things forward.