It felt like waking up.

For four years, I had been paying, on autopilot, a set of bills I had come to experience as obligations rather than the free gifts they actually were.

And in the space of five minutes, I simply stopped giving away my own money to people who despised me for it.

That is not an attack.

That is a person, at long last, coming to her own defense.

And I want to name precisely the confusion that had kept me paying for so long, because it is the confusion that traps a great many generous people, and it took a bare white plate to break it.