What the mask costs the person wearing it — and the person loving it

Nobody hands you a moment where you decide to become smaller. It happens in increments so fine you could not point to one of them in a courtroom.

You stop mentioning the friend she doesn't like. You preview sentences before you say them. You develop a sixth sense for the particular silence that means a week of punishment is coming, and you start heading it off days in advance.

This is the part memoir readers sometimes struggle with: why did you stay. The honest answer is that I didn't experience it as staying. I experienced it as managing. Managing felt like competence, and competence was the last piece of myself I had left.

The mask costs the wearer, too. She was exhausting herself maintaining a version of a woman who had to be admired at all times. But her exhaustion was never a bill she paid. It was a bill she handed to me.