I was being actively, expertly convinced not to notice, by people I had every reason to trust.

That is what makes this kind of harm so uniquely cruel: it does not only hurt you, it recruits your own mind to help hide the hurt.

Every time I woke disarranged and confused, there was a trusted voice — my husband’s — ready with a calm, reasonable explanation, delivered so easily, so unbothered, that doubting it felt like the paranoid act, not believing it.

They were not just drugging me.