She told me the hand-washing in her sleep was her mind trying, over and over, to get clean of something that wasn’t on her hands at all.

None of it was weakness and none of it was madness.

It was an ordinary human nervous system that had been asked to carry more than one is built to carry, doing exactly what an overloaded system does.

What she had needed all along was not to be stronger.

It was to be helped.

And she had been so certain that needing help was the same as failing us that she had hidden the need until it nearly buried her.