At my lowest, everything went quiet. The job was gone. The marriage was over. The house echoed with a kind of stillness I hadn’t felt in years. No more tiptoeing. No more rehearsing responses. Just… space.

For most of my life, I believed people loved me the way I loved them. That if they hurt me, it was a misunderstanding. If they left me out, there was a reasonable explanation. If something felt off, the problem was probably me.