It is exhausting to make yourself small.

It is exhausting to sit at a dinner and let a man explain your own industry to you, to swallow the correction, to arrange your face into gratitude for a life you could have bought and sold ten times over.

I had told myself the discomfort was the price of an honest answer, and it was, but that did not make it weigh less.

Standing on the sidewalk with my marriage in ruins behind me, what I felt more than anything was the specific relief of a person setting down a heavy thing she has carried so long she’d forgotten it was heavy.

The small apologetic woman was finished.

I would never have to be her again.