It was simply a door I had chosen to close, so that I could learn to be a person who did other things.

I had wanted, badly, to be ordinary.

I had wanted to be a woman who worried about ordinary things, whose hardest daily decisions were about logistics and schedules, who could sit at a family dinner and simply be a daughter rather than a set of trained reflexes that never fully switched off.

And for a few good years, I had mostly managed it.

What I did not expect, what almost no one expects, is that the old training does not leave you because you have asked it to.