More and more, all I wanted to do was burn things to the ground. I was angry: angry that I had to navigate this patriarchal culture to have any hope of getting justice; angry that, as a woman who could easily be dismissed as hysterical, I was responsible for carrying the burden of proof; angry that on some level I still felt like I’d betrayed my family by leaving this small town and never coming back, making me forever an outsider. The divide between me and the girl I’d been was so vast that all I could feel across it was rage. And so everything infuriated me, from the weeks it would take for
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