Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

I was reminded that having extra needs does not make you too difficult, too time consuming, but worthy of compassion and love.

Old ideas about who I was resurfaced, told me I was damaged, unworthy. Some of the shame had calcified, impervious to praise.

My mom’s favorite joke is about a spider and a centipede having tea. The centipede gets up and offers to go buy snacks. He goes out the door and hours pass. The spider is so hungry, wondering what happened, and opens the door, only to find the centipede sitting on the doormat, still putting on his shoes. I imagine myself the centipede, struggling to tie each of my hundred tiny shoes, it takes me longer to get going than most. But I will put on shoe after shoe after shoe until I can get up and go again.

We grew used to the same patterns of deflect, defend, dilute.

He never said it was supposed to be different, only said it was supposed to be private.

In his testimony, I heard the familiar expectation that a victim be flawless, in order to be worthy of life. The audacity to smoke marijuana provided sufficient reason to die. The defense calling me a party animal meant I, too, deserved to be raped.

My advice is, if he’s worried about his reputation, don’t rape anyone.

In his mother’s three-and-a-half-page single-spaced statement, I was not mentioned once. Erasure is a form of oppression, the refusal to see.

Do you understand, when you ask a victim to report, what you’re telling her to walk into? Why didn’t she go to the police? I had deputies, a detective, paramedics, I had squad cars, an ambulance. I had them handcuffing him, photographing me, recording witness accounts, jotting down every detail of my body from the thin chain wrapped around my neck to the laces of my shoes, my clothes collected, his clothes collected. I pressed charges within twenty-four hours of the assault and here I was three years later reading the appellate attorney’s statements about how I was clearly in front of the dumpster, not in any way “behind” it. How it was “merely exterior massaging” of my “genital opening,” how we were enamored young people expressing their sexual urges. When you say go to the police what do you envision? I was grateful for my team. But the police will move on to other cases while the victim is left in the agonizing, protracted judicial process, where she will be made to question, and then forget, who she is. You were just physically attacked? Here’s some information on how you can enter a multiyear process of verbal abuse. Often it seems easier to suffer rape alone, than face the dismembering that comes with seeking support.

When society questions a victim’s reluctance to report, I will be here to remind you that you ask us to sacrifice our sanity to fight outdated structures that were designed to keep us down.

The real question we need to be asking is not, Why didn’t she report, the question is, Why would you?

His talent precedes the tragedy. She was supposedly born in it. I did not come into existence when he harmed me. She found her voice! I had a voice, he stripped it, left me groping around blind for a bit, but I always had it.

still our bodies remembered. And while our minds attempted to abandon it entirely, late at night, lying awake alone, our bodies protested, you can’t.

Society thinks we live to come after him. When in fact, we live to live. That’s it. He upended that life, and we tried to keep going, but couldn’t.

Each time a survivor resurfaced, people were quick to say what does she want, why did it take her so long, why now, why not then, why not faster. But damage does not stick to deadlines. If she emerges, why don’t we ask her how it was possible she lived with that hurt for so long, ask who taught her to never uncover it.

only after withstanding unbearable amounts of torment could that tone be achieved.

Preventing assault is so much cheaper than trying to address it after the fact.

I tried, I should have said back. That was me, not you. I called you. I should have pushed back. Hadn’t I already felt echoes of this in the court system? Chanel not seeing that. The subtle gaslighting, the shifting of blame and burden back onto the victim.

You will find society asking you for the happy ending, saying come back when you’re better, when what you say can make us feel good, when you have something more uplifting, affirming.

This ugliness was something I never asked for, it was dropped on me, and for a long time I worried it made me ugly too. It made me into a sad, unwelcome story that nobody wanted to hear.

Denying darkness does not bring anyone closer to the light.

When you hear a story about rape, all the graphic and unsettling details, resist the instinct to turn away; instead look closer, because beneath the gore and the police reports is a whole, beautiful person, looking for ways to be in the world again.

WRITING IS THE way I process the world. When I was given the opportunity to write this book, whatever God is up there said, You got your dream. I said, Actually I was hoping for a lighter topic, and God was like, Ha ha! You thought you got to choose. This was the topic I was given. If something else had happened to me, I would have written about that too. When I get worked up over what happened, I tell myself, you are a pair of eyes. I’m a civilian who’s been randomly selected to receive an all-access pass to the court system. Feelings will include invasion, shame, isolation, cruelty. My job is to observe, feel, document, report.

So much of surviving was sacrifice, cutting things short, suppressing life to do what’s needed to make it to tomorrow. I wanted those bright petals to unfurl. I ran upstairs, my arms full of green stalks, sliding them into water.

On June 5, 2018, the judge was recalled. I remembered a quote from him in the San Francisco Chronicle: Women are frustrated by how they are treated by society, how they are treated by the criminal justice system. That passion is genuine. It needs to be expressed. Expressed was the wrong word. We the victims are tired of expression, I expressed a lot in his courtroom. The word we need is: acknowledged, taken into account, taken seriously.

And then, all the and thens ceased. Nothing remains to be done in the Order of time, when all is still.

I am not sure exactly what healing is or looks like, what form it comes in, what it should feel like. I do know that when I was four I could not lift a gallon of milk, could not believe how heavy it was, that white sloshing boulder. I’d pull up a wooden chair to stand over the counter, pouring the milk with two shaking arms, wetting the cereal, spilling. Looking back I don’t remember the day I lifted it with ease. All I know is that now I do it without thinking, can do it one-handed, on the phone, in a rush. I believe the same rules apply, that one day I’ll be able to tell this story without it shaking my foundation. Each time will not require an entire production, a spilling, a sweating forehead, a mess to clean up, sopping paper towels. It will just be a part of my life, every day lighter to lift.

It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something. Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place. I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving. If I got stuck inside scenes in the courtroom, I would glance down at Mogu and wonder, if I am really in the past, how did this blinking thing get in my house? I assembled and reassembled letters in ways that would describe what I’d seen and felt. As I revisited that landscape, I grew more in control, could come and go when I needed to. Until one day I found there was nothing left to gather. The transcripts that once overwhelmed me were now only pieces of paper. I began to belong more to my present than my past. I was no longer trying to get somewhere, only asking myself, Are you improving? Sometimes the answer was not today. Sometimes I was regressing. But the voice in my head was now gentler. Whatever the answer, I was patient and understanding.

It’s because I need to clear a space inside myself where hard feelings can be put to rest.

For years, the crime of sexual assault depended on our silence. The fear of knowing what happened if we spoke. Society gave us one thousand reasons; don’t speak if you lack evidence, if it happened too long ago, if you were drunk, if the man is powerful, if you’ll face blowback, if it threatens your safety. Ford broke all the rules. She had none of the requirements society tells us we need before we dare open our mouths. She had every reason to stay hidden, but stepped straight into the most public, volatile, combative environment imaginable, because she possessed the single thing she needed, the truth.