And about the thing that did not survive any of this, which was not my nervous system, which is improving, or my finances, which are recovering, or my ability to trust my own perceptions, which my therapist and I are working on with the patient attention it deserves. What did not survive was my understanding of the word ordinary, the idea that ordinary people, in ordinary houses on ordinary streets, do not do the things that were done to me. I know better now. I know that the most successful cruelty wears the most ordinary clothes, that it operates precisely in the space of trust that family and routine and small repeated gestures create, that it depends on the victim’s fundamental decency, her willingness to extend benefit of the doubt, her trained instinct to smooth things over and not make them a thing.
I was good at not making things a thing. For years I was excellent at it.
