That is what we do, when the unreasonable truth is too large to hold.

We reach, desperately, for the small explanation, because the small explanation lets us go on living the life we already have.

And I want to be gentle with that woman, the one who reached for the small explanations, because for a long time afterward I was not gentle with her at all.

In the first months of my recovery, the question that tormented me most was not how could they do that to me but how could I not have seen it sooner — how could an intelligent, careful, professionally suspicious woman have sat at that table month after month and talked herself out of the truth her own body was screaming.

I judged myself brutally for it, until a therapist helped me understand what had actually been happening, which is that I was not simply failing to notice.