I did not know how to be a person who was not carrying it alone.

I had been carrying it so long that the weight of it had become my own shape.

It would take me a long time to learn to stand up straight without it, to trust that the floor was really there, that the wave I had watched for my whole life was not going to come after all.”

Chapter 22 — The Afternoon I Resigned

I handed in my resignation that same afternoon, standing in the same little office where, hours before, I had opened a binder and found my own name at the top of it.