Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

snaked up inside of me, the internal walls of my

I didn’t know that money could make the cell doors swing open. I didn’t know that if a woman was drunk when the violence occurred, she wouldn’t be taken seriously. I didn’t know that if he was drunk when the violence occurred, people would offer him sympathy. I didn’t know that my loss of memory would become his opportunity. I didn’t know that being a victim was synonymous with not being believed.

In rape cases it’s strange to me when people say, Well why didn’t you fight him? If you woke up to a robber in your home, saw him taking your stuff, people wouldn’t ask, Well why didn’t you fight him? Why didn’t you tell him no? He’s already violating an unspoken rule, why would he suddenly decide to adhere to reason? What would give you reason to think he’d stop if you told him to? And in this case, with my being unconscious, why were there still so many questions?

There was another line of argument that nagged at me: the suggestion that boys simply could not help themselves. As if he never had a choice. I have told each of my girls heading off to college: If you walk in front of a semi truck expect to get hit. Don’t walk in front of a semi. If you go to a frat party expect to get drunk, drugged and raped. Don’t go to a frat party. You went to a frat and got assaulted? What did you expect? I’d heard this in college, freshman girls in frats compared to sheep in a slaughterhouse. I understand you are not supposed to walk into a lion’s den because you could be mauled. But lions are wild animals. And boys are people, they have minds, live in a society with laws. Groping others was not a natural reflex, biologically built in. It was a cognitive action they were capable of controlling.

said flowers were something I could give them

didn’t realize how much I’d craved being wrapped in the arms of another person.

felt this need to be touched, but wanted nothing to do with invade, inject, insert, inside, only wanted the intimacy of being wrapped up safely in something.

was beginning to believe that being an adult on my own was going to be okay, maybe.

He knew things I did not: Spanish, rugby, math, confidence.

He had gone to middle school in Japan, knew the texture of alpacas in Peru, dipped his toe in every corner of this little blue earth. Palo Alto was just a speck!

Maybe the universe had loaned me his presence to show me love was possible again, and would now take him back, leaving me to deal with this new eruption.

In Palo Alto, I was beginning to feel acutely that I was not fitting into old patterns of myself, who I was or who I thought I would be. I wanted a place where I could create, a corner of the world where I could disappear.

Healing needed privacy, needed patience, needed nurturing. Healing required planting seeds in the soft, dark underground.

I was hit by a moment of sadness, reminded that in life, people moved on. That’s what you do, that’s what was supposed to happen.

This time I wondered what behavior was acceptable for a victim. What tone? She warned me not to get angry. I learned that if you’re angry, you’re defensive. If you’re flat, you’re apathetic. Too upbeat, you’re suspect. If you weep, you’re hysterical. Being too emotional made you unreliable. But being unemotional made you unaffected. How should I balance it all?

I wish there had been a predatory expert, victim expert, consent expert to better educate the jury. We scrutinized the victim’s actions, instead of examining the behavioral patterns of sexual predators. How alcohol works to the predator’s advantage, to lower resistance, weaken the limbs.

The judge argued he’d already lost so much, given up so many opportunities. What happens to those who start off with little to lose? Instead of a nineteen-year-old Stanford athlete, let’s imagine a Hispanic nineteen-year-old working in the kitchen of the fraternity commits the same crime. Does this story end differently? Does The Washington Post call him a surgeon?

I was hard on myself for a long time, feeling like I did not do enough. But I am learning.

The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s.