There is a story people like to tell about survival, in which the confrontation is the climax and everything after is a montage of healing set to hopeful music.

Real recovery is not like that.

The confrontation took one night.

The rehabilitation took the better part of a year — the slow, unglamorous, infuriating work of teaching a body to walk ten meters, then twenty, then across a room without a wall to catch me.

There were days when ten meters felt harder than standing up at that gala had.

And underneath the physical work was the other kind, the sessions with a therapist where I slowly took apart thirty-four years of a self built to feel guilty enough to keep giving, and tried to construct, in its place, a woman who could love people without being run by them.