I don’t want to do that.
I sat across from a woman named Dr. Okafor every Tuesday for seven months, and I told her things I had never said out loud.
And she helped me understand something that I think is important.
The betrayal wasn’t only that Daniel had been unfaithful.
The betrayal was also that I had arranged my entire life to support and protect a situation that was not what I thought it was.
And in doing so, I had made myself smaller in ways I hadn’t noticed until there was space to look.
The financial dependence my in-laws had developed wasn’t something Daniel had built accidentally.
He had allowed it, encouraged it even, because it kept me obligated.
It kept me too busy, too responsible, too needed to look too closely at anything else.
When you take away the structure built to keep you from seeing, you have to decide what to do with the view.
I kept my job.
