Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do. —TONI MORRISON

When I was little I wanted to grow up and become a mascot, so I’d have the freedom to dance without being seen.

Shame could not breathe here, would be shooed away.

When I was little, I never asked anyone if I was an artist. I just cleared enough space on the table to make room for my paper.

You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do.

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

What a relief to feel so small, to go unnoticed in this wordless world.

I wondered how it happened that I was now spending more time with my rapist than my friends.

What I prayed was not that the black hole would disappear, but that all of us would have a chance to grow up beneath it first,

The way I saw it, my side was going to convince the jury that the big yellow thing in the sky is the sun. His side had to convince the jury that it’s an egg yolk.

The slivers we show, the mountains we hide.

He believed he could break us, but from this day forward, I would begin to build.

He had given himself permission to enter me again, this time stuffing words into my mouth.

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

But I also knew this feeling would not be infinite. As soon as the sun came up, the worst would be behind me. When the sun rose, I’d be inside a new life.

All it took for any ambiguous or mean or victim-blaming comments to disappear was your voice.

I believe, out of the millions who knew I was brave and important, I was the last to know it.

I thought of the man in the thick black jacket, sitting by the tracks in the foldout chair, hired to save lives. I realized, since I was seventeen, that was the job I wanted. The only difference was that I sat on a chair at home, writing the words that would get you to stay here, to see the value of you, the beauty of your life. So if you come on the worst day of your life, my hope is to catch you, to gently guide you back.

you can only sweep so many humans under the rug, before your rug becomes mountainous and lumpy.

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.

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.

To my grandfather, Lovick, a six-foot-two World War II veteran who read books thick as bricks, but sat in his office with a little handwritten pile of my poems beside him, typing them up one by one, so they would never be lost.

Hafiz poem: 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 ligh...

Ram Dass said, Allow that you are at this moment not in the wrong place in your life. Consider the possibility that there have been no errors in the game. Just consider it. Consider that there is not an error, and everything tha...

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.

This book does not have a happy ending. The happy part is there is no ending, because I’ll always find a way to keep going.

Her grandma’s feet had been bound. Four-inch feet, and now mine, size 9½. Every generation, we get a little more free.

I have learned I am water. The coals sizzle, extinguishing when they reach me. I see now, those fiery coals are just black stones, sinking to the bottom.

Who held the gravity in that room? It was her. Her words rose from the center of her being, resonated throughout the nation. She was the mountain, their words like fleeting winds and harsh rain, while she did not move. When she spoke it was sobering, the sadness filling our insides with sand until everyone had sunk in their seats. The truth holds weight.

Lao Tzu’s poems: He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm.

If you want to break yourself, to be bigger, to help other women, do that. Pain always gives you more power to go forward. Happiness and comfort don’t. It all depends on who you want to be.

When I wanted comfort, I remembered a story my mom told me, about befriending a lobster when she was twelve. One day, her uncle boiled it and she cried and cried. The regret she had, she said, was naming it, because that’s what made the loss so painful. I figured, when I revealed myself, I’d promptly be boiled. But people would still have felt a moment of connection, my name nestled safely in their memory, the way my mom spoke so tenderly about a lobster.

To be known is to be loved.

My purpose will always be greater than my fear.

All my life I’ve been kept afloat by good people in heavy circumstances.

Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else. You were about to enter four years of access to drunk girls and parties, and if this is the foot you started off on, then it is right you did not continue.

As the author Anne Lamott once wrote, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”