She did not walk into the sun because the world had finally accepted her; the world had not, and she knew it, and she went anyway.

She walked into the sun because she had decided, at last, that her own acceptance of herself did not require anyone else’s, that she could be beautiful whether or not a single other person agreed, that her body was hers to inhabit with dignity regardless of what strangers thought when they looked at it.

That is a completely different kind of freedom than the one I had spent sixteen years trying to win for her, and it is the only kind that actually lasts, because it does not depend on other people at all.

I had been trying to change the world for my daughter.