And then I remember nothing, until the hospital.
A neighbor had heard the screaming and called for help.
I have thought often about that neighbor, a person whose name I still do not know, and about how a stranger’s single phone call did what ten years of my own endurance never could: it got me out of that house alive.
I would spend the following year learning that lesson in a hundred forms.
Endurance had never once saved me.
Every time I was actually saved, it was because someone acted.
That is the single most important thing I learned from the whole ordeal, and it overturned a belief I had been raised inside so completely that I had never once thought to question it.
I had been taught, as so many women are taught, that endurance is a virtue — that the strong woman is the one who bears things, who holds the family together through her own quiet suffering, who does not complain, who keeps the peace at any cost to herself.
I had built my entire identity on that idea.
I was proud of how much I could endure.
And it very nearly killed me, because the terrible secret about endurance is that it changes nothing.
Enduring an abuser does not soften them; it teaches them what they can get away with.
Enduring exploitation does not earn you eventual gratitude; it establishes the baseline they will only demand you exceed.
Every year I endured the Miller family taught them, precisely, that I would endure a little more, and so they asked for a little more, and I gave it, and called the giving strength.
Endurance is not strength.
