The very notes he had spread on that table to discredit me became, when read honestly by the right eyes, the proof that I was well.

I have thought a great deal, since, about what he tried to do in that living room, and about how common and how cruel it is.

He reached for my most vulnerable season, the months when I had needed help and had been brave enough to get it, and he tried to turn that courage into a weapon against me.

It is a particular kind of violence, to take a person’s honest struggle and hold it up as evidence that they cannot be trusted about their own life.