Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

believe he is not absolved of the title simply because he ran out of time.

I did not know that at 11:00 P.M. the previous night, he had been released on $150,000 bail. Less than twenty-four hours after being arrested, he was already free.

I thought if I executed my delivery correctly we could avoid suffering entirely.

But resilience required rest. For the next eight months I was going to fall back. The most important thing to remember was that to be at the rear, to be slower, did not mean you were not a leader.

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

He was the one who lost everything. I was just the nobody it happened to.

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?

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.

When did it become our job to do all the preventing and managing?

And if houses existed where many young girls were getting hurt, shouldn’t we hold the guys in these houses to a higher standard, instead of reprimanding the girls?

I knew her accented English could be perceived as broken and simple, but it concealed genius.

But it bothered me that having a boyfriend and being assaulted should be related, as if I, alone, was not enough.

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?

I learned it was expensive to be assaulted.

No one told me I could do it, except me, which meant that no one could tell me I couldn’t do it, except me.

Safety was always an illusion.

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?

I do not include the victims’ names here, for names are sacred, and I do not want them identified solely by what he did to them.

You deserve to be annihilated and I will give that to you. You never showed me any mercy so I will show you none.

Sleep was no longer rest, but vulnerability.

It had never occurred to me that I’d given the opinions of online strangers equal weight to actual people.

It is not pathetic to feel and react.

Why should I carry the shame for the things that were done to my body.

It was not for me, but at the expense of me, that we’d be able to get there.

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. I had to believe her, because she was living proof. Then she said, Good and bad things come from the universe holding hands. Wait for the good to come.

my body was saying, you have to listen to me. You have to respect my needs. We have to work together or you will end up hurt.

If you pay enough money, if you say the right things, if you take enough time to weaken and dilute the truth, the sun could slowly begin to look like an egg. Not only was this possible, it happens all the time.

My heart lit up; the nurse, a protector in this game. I wondered which nurse it was; I remembered three of them huddled around the peaks of my naked knees. I liked to imagine them as a three-headed dragon in a white coat, snapping mouths and metal tools, fighting off anything that came after me.

No is the beginning and end of this story.

I had unlocked the secret of the game; this was not a quest for justice but a test of endurance.

Fuck what you sipped, how you sipped, when you sipped with whom, fuck if I danced on the table, fuck if I danced on the chair. You want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Your whole answer was sitting with his shoulders low, head down, his neatly cut hair. You want to know why my whole goddamn family was hurting, why I lost my job, why I had four digits in my bank account, why my sister was missing school? It was because on a cool January evening, I went out, while that guy, that guy there, had decided that yes or no, moving or motionless, he wanted to fuck someone, intended to fuck someone, and it happened to be me.

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.

I hoped Stanford would soon find you can only sweep so many humans under the rug, before your rug becomes mountainous and lumpy.

He was talked about in terms of his lost potential, what he would never be, rather than what he is. They spoke as if his future was patiently waiting for him to step into it. Most of us understand that your future is not promised to you. It is constructed day by day, through the choices you make. Your future is earned, little by little, through hard work and action. If you don’t act accordingly, that dream dissolves.

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.

He may sit in a cell, but he will never know what it’s like to be unhomed from his own body.

Put their words on a plaque. Mark that spot, because in my mind I’ve erected a monument. The place to be remembered is not where I was assaulted, but where he fell, where I was saved, where two men declared stop, no more, not here, not now, not ever.

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.

How fast Brock swims does not lessen the severity of what happened to me, and should not lessen the severity of his punishment.