I thought about accountability also as something I owed myself — the accountability of being honest with myself about what I was feeling and what I was doing and why. There were moments when I was afraid, and I tried to be honest about that. There were moments when I was angry, and I tried to be honest about that. There was a moment, somewhere in the middle months, when I realized I had been holding some of the anger at my mother and some of it at myself — a background whisper of why didn’t you check your report more often, why didn’t you know — and I had to do the work of understanding that what happened was not a failure of my vigilance. I had signed up for credit monitoring. I had gotten the alert. What happened was someone making a choice they did not have the right to make. I did not make it happen by not monitoring closely enough.
Holding myself to that accuracy was also accountability. The smaller kind, the private kind, the kind that no one sees but that matters for being able to look at yourself clearly.
## Six Months Before and Six Months After
If I try to describe who I was six months before the credit alert and who I am now, six months after the lender’s decision, the differences are quieter than I might have expected.
Six months before: working at a job I was good at, building savings toward a plan, talking to Tessa on the phone, texting Luke occasionally, sending my mother brief responses to her texts, thinking about the next apartment, doing the quiet work of building a life in a city that is not where I grew up.