You’re finding out where the pieces actually go.”

I have thought about that sentence more than almost any other thing anyone has ever said to me.

For six years I had been told a story about myself — that I was defective, that I was the reason, that my body had failed the man who was so good to me — and I had built my entire understanding of who I was on top of that story, the way you build a house on ground you assume is solid.

Learning the truth didn’t feel like healing.

It felt like demolition.

The ground I’d stood on was gone, and for a while there was nothing under me at all, just the vertigo of realizing that the person I’d believed myself to be had been an invention, authored by someone who profited from my believing it.