Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

They seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability. Drinking is not inherently immoral: a night of heavy drinking calls for Advil and water. But being drunk and raped seemed to call for condemnation. People were confounded that I had failed to protect myself.

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?

They were deciding whether I’d make a good victim: is her character upstanding, does she seem durable, will the jury find her likable, will she stay with us moving forward. I walked out feeling like, You got the job! I did not want this job. I wanted my old life. But let him walk away? I could not let it happen. Pressing charges was my choice, they’d say, but sometimes you feel you don’t have one.

What if you’re assaulted and you didn’t already belong to a male? Was having a boyfriend the only way to have your autonomy respected? Later I’d read suggestions that I cried rape because I was ashamed I had cheated on my boyfriend. Somehow the victim never wins.

a hand from the button of her jeans, to turn down a drink. When a woman is assaulted, one of the first questions people ask is, Did you say no? This question assumes that the answer was always yes, and that it is her job to revoke the agreement. To defuse the bomb she was given. But why are they allowed to touch us until we physically fight them off? Why is the door open until we have to slam it shut?

This was no longer a fight against my rapist, it was a fight to be humanized. I had to hold on to my story, figure out how to make myself heard. If I didn’t break out, I’d become a statistic. Another red figure in a grid.

But I never questioned that any of what they said about him was true. In fact I need you to know it was all true. The friendly guy who helps you move and assists senior citizens in the pool is the same guy who assaulted me. One person can be capable of both. Society often fails to wrap its head around the fact that these truths often coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. Bad qualities can hide inside a good person. That’s the terrifying part.

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

My point can be summed up in the line Brock wrote: I just existed in a reality where nothing can go wrong or nobody could think of what I was doing as wrong. Privilege accompanies the light skinned, helped maintain his belief that consequences did not apply to him. In this system, who is untouchable? Who is disposable? Whose lives are we intent on preserving? Who goes unaccounted for? Who is the true disrupter, the one firing, the one fingering, who created a problem where there never was one?

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. Many of us struggle to crawl out from under what we’ve been given, to build ourselves beyond the small definitions we’ve been assigned. I feared, at times, that I’d lost my imagination, because I felt boxed in my role as victim. But when I was trapped, I learned I could still move internally. When I felt depressed, I wrote and imagined my future down to the coffee bean, the children’s books I will illustrate, the chickens I will have in my yard, the soft cotton linens, the sauce-dipped wooden spoons on the counter. The need for it to come true according to plan was not important. The act of imagining was.