I don’t remember the first time I woke up wet. I only remember the feeling of it becoming normal — the cold shock of it against my legs in the dark, the walk to the bathroom with my pajamas clinging to me, the quiet ritual of stripping the sheets and balling them into the hamper before anyone else was awake. I got very good at being quiet about it.

I was a bedwetter. That’s the word they used, the word I learned to say in a small voice at the doctor’s office while my mother sat beside me and nodded along, translating my shame into something clinical. “It’s very common,” the doctor said, and I remember thinking that “common” was the cruelest word in the English language, because it meant there were other kids like me out there, and none of us ever talked about it.

The struggles weren’t the accidents themselves, not really. The accidents were just a fact, like the color of my hair. The struggle was everything built on top of them. The sleepovers I turned down with excuses I rehearsed in the mirror. The school trips I dreaded for weeks, lying awake in a strange bed, terrified of what the morning would reveal. The way I learned to fold my own laundry early, to do my own sheets, to carry my own secrets. I became, at ten years old, a small expert in the logistics of hiding.

And then there was the protection. My parents made me wear GoodNites to bed — or “highly encouraged” it, which in our house meant the same thing — to keep the bed dry. I understood, even then, that they were trying to help, that a dry bed meant less laundry and less shame and one less thing to hide. But I hated those pull-ups with a quiet, burning intensity. They crinkled when I moved. They were a constant, physical reminder of the thing I was trying so hard to pretend wasn’t happening. Every night, pulling them on, I felt the secret made solid, something I could touch, something that rustled under my pajamas and gave me away to no one but myself.

There was a stretch of years — starting when I was fifteen — where it stopped. The dry years. I don’t know why it stopped, and neither did anyone else. It just… did. One morning I woke up dry, and then another, and then enough mornings in a row that I stopped counting. I remember the strange grief of it, which sounds backwards, but it’s true. I had built so much of my identity around this one private, shameful thing, and when it left, I didn’t know who I was without it. I had spent years being the kid with the secret, and suddenly I was just a kid.

I told myself it was over. I believed it. I went to college believing it.