He was going to take a sixty-two-year-old woman scrubbing grease on her knees and turn it into a hobby she enjoyed.

It is a specific kind of violence, that reframing, and I want to name it because it so often goes unnamed.

The physical things they did to her were terrible, but they were at least honest; a shove is a shove, a bruise is a bruise.

This was something subtler and, in its way, more corrosive.

It was the theft of the truth itself, the insistence that what was happening was not what was happening, that her degradation was her preference, that her exhaustion was her purpose.

Do that to a person long enough and you do not just hurt them; you make them doubt their own experience of being hurt.