Sometimes I look older than I feel. Sometimes my hands seem bigger than they should be or I feel taller than I think I should be.

I understood these things intellectually, the way I understand that the world is round or that gravity is a universal force. But it took me a long time to truly grasp what Dr. Summer had told me many times before: "To survive a violent childhood, you created aspects of your consciousness that held information about the violence away from you. That's why you remember it as if it happened to someone else. You have many ways of being you.

Over and over, I thought, I needed to separate into parts in my head. I needed to separate into parts in my head, but I couldn't make sense of this. They were just words that didn't come together into something meaningful. A thought came up, I chased it and was able to hold on to it long enough to ponder it: I could not know this or something bad would have happened.