For twelve years, my family’s method had depended on a single reliable component: my compulsion to smooth things over.

They could push, and manipulate, and take, and blame, secure in the knowledge that eventually, when the tension grew unbearable, I would be the one to break it — to apologize, to concede, to take the blame onto myself, to say the thing that let everyone off the hook, because I could not stand to leave a conflict raw and open.

My need to fix the discomfort was the load-bearing wall of the whole arrangement.

It was what made me reliably wearable-down.