““I had become a girl, then a woman, living in shadow, who could not bear the weight of her own heart - my heart, sunk as stone, silt cradled at the bottom of a lake. It was easy to live in that place for all those years. I had eroticized myself as unbreakable: beyond the reach of any lover I lay with, protected. Fiercely independent, I was a girl who could accelerate from 0 to 140 in ten seconds flat, a good-time girl who left them wanting more. When I started to want more for myself, when that lake became too murky to navigate, I wrestled with the big lie that had become the bedrock of my gender, my desire, my whole self: I am unbreakable. I am not broken. ””