I have thought a great deal about why that file frightened me more than anything else Christian did, and I believe it is because it attacked the one thing a person cannot live without, which is trust in their own mind.
For a year I had felt myself slipping — tired for no reason, foggy, uncertain, quicker to doubt my own perceptions than I had ever been.
And I had done what most of us do with that feeling, which is to turn it inward: I must be stressed, I must be weak, I must be coming undone.
But it is a kind of violence, and Attorney Cardenas told me the law had names for it: fraud, coercion, conspiracy, the falsifying of medical records.
Names I intended to see him answer to.
I have thought a great deal about why that file frightened me more than anything else Christian did, and I believe it is because it attacked the one thing a person cannot live without, which is trust in their own mind.
For a year I had felt myself slipping — tired for no reason, foggy, uncertain, quicker to doubt my own perceptions than I had ever been.
And I had done what most of us do with that feeling, which is to turn it inward: I must be stressed, I must be weak, I must be coming undone.
I had been taken apart, deliberately, by hands I trusted, and there is a strange freedom in that — the freedom of a person who discovers that the enemy she’d been fighting inside her own skull was never inside it at all.
Dr.
Pratt’s honest evaluation and Lawson’s dishonest one, side by side, told the whole story of what had been done to me.
One was a doctor writing what she saw.
The other was a doctor writing what he was paid to make true.
I have kept both, to this day, because together they are the map of the exact place I was almost lost, and the proof that I was not.
Chapter 11 — The Threat
