Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

This moment is not pain, not hysteria, not crying. It is your insides turning to cold stones. It is utter confusion paired with knowing. Gone is the luxury of growing up slowly. So begins the brutal awakening.

The victim in me vanished as I became the older sister.

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 this crime, pain could be disguised and confused as pleasure.

To deny my messiness would be to deny my humanity.

My DA would later tell me women aren’t preferred on juries of rape cases because they’re likely to resist empathizing with the victim, insisting there must be something wrong with her because that would never happen to me. I thought of mothers who had commented, My daughters would never . . . which made me sad because comments like that did not make her daughter any safer, just ensured that if the daughter was raped, she’d likely have one less person to go to.

My therapist had said, Visualize women around you, behind you, touching your shoulder, walking with you.

If I needed help, I would have to turn inward. Everything I need to get through this, I already have. Everything I need to know I already know. Everything I need to be, I already am.

I looked at the little pile of broken wood and thought, I got us out. I will always find a way.

Somehow I was different, cast outside their range of empathy.

Every woman who spoke out did so because she hit a point where she could no longer live another day in the life she tried to build. So she turned, slowly, back around to face it.

Their words were made of steel.

Leave your pain here and go out and do your magnificent things.

Because I want to preserve your comfort. Because I have been told that what I have to say is too dark, too upsetting, too targeting, too triggering, let’s tone it down. 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.

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.

I used to shrink at harsh tones, used to be afraid. Until I learned it takes nothing to be hostile. Nothing. It is easy to be the one yelling, chucking words that burn like coals, neon red, meant to harm. 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.

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.

Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. 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.

Whenever I hear a survivor say they wish they’d had the courage to come forward, I instinctively shake my head. It was never about your courage. Fear of retaliation is real. Security is not free. It bothered me that coming forward should feel like heading toward a guillotine. I don’t think most survivors want to live in hiding. We do because silence means safety. Openness means retaliation. Which means it’s not the telling of the stories that we fear, it’s what people will do when we tell our stories.

I often question where men like the defense attorney get their confidence, while I’m the one who struggles with self-loathing. How they move, unassailable, through the world, while I remain hidden. I decided that for as long as they’re out there, I will be out there too.

You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself.

The seriousness of rape has to be communicated clearly, we should not create a culture that suggests we learn that rape is wrong through trial and error.