Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

What was I supposed to do with this timeline of some broken stranger?

This refusal is another harm in itself. I deny your truth, it is not real, it does not exist. This will tinker with your sanity.

They seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability.

no one could tell me how to hold all this hostility, this wrecking sadness.

Loving someone is a painful thing.

But the compliments didn’t feel like compliments when my body language communicated I didn’t want to be looked at, didn’t want to be spoken to.

She endangered herself, asked for trouble. Always she, always she.

How much was I expected to take, to absorb and ignore, while they yelled and clicked their tongues so freely, with no fear of being confronted.

The word seven was displayed in tall, white letters at the bottom of the screen. It seemed wrong to group the dead. It was not seven; it was one and one and one and one and one and one and one. Each an entire life, each with a name.

I do not attribute surviving to willpower or optimism because none of this I had.

Good and bad things come from the universe holding hands. Wait for the good to come.

It had never occurred to me that the system itself could be wrong, could be changed or improved. Victims could ask for more.

Why is it that we’re wary of victims making false accusations, but rarely consider how many men have blatantly lied about, downplayed, or manipulated others to cover their own actions?

You’re not a bad person or a good person, but what you did on that night is not acceptable, it’s not okay, and it violates the law.

She wrote, “Remember that you own what happened to you. . . . You cannot write out of someone else’s dark place; you can only write out of your own.”

The only sorrow I feel for you is that you never got to know my sister before you assaulted her.

If he says he’s sorry, but maintains he’s not guilty, doesn’t that resemble manipulation more than reconciliation?

In swimming, one one-hundredth of a second is the difference between victory and loss. Yet they wanted to write off twenty minutes as insignificant.

The judge had given Brock something that would never be extended to me: empathy. My pain was never more valuable than his potential.

I am not limited, I am ever expanding. Your suffering means something.

But the incredible thing is that a victim is also the smiling girl in a green apron making your coffee, she just handed you your change. She just taught a class of first-graders. She has her headphones in, tapping her foot on the subway. Victims are all around you.

From the mesoderm, one’s bones and connective tissues and heart emerged. We know how to form our being, she said. We still have that information, it still informs us.

But no matter the despair or exhaustion, I believe the wanting of a better world and being here to see it will never go away. The wanting is enough.

In his testimony, I heard the familiar expectation that a victim be flawless, in order to be worthy of life.

If punishment is based on potential, privileged people will be given lighter sentences.

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

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

Society thinks we live to come after him. When in fact, we live to live.

My unending attempts to reconcile and reconstruct the world I grew up in.

It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something.

If I have forgiven him, it’s not because I’m holy. It’s because I need to clear a space inside myself where hard feelings can be put to rest.

Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom.