Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

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.

didn’t know that being a victim was synonymous with not being believed.

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

If I kept drinking, would the defense argue I was never affected? If I uploaded photos of myself smiling at a party, would the defense say I never suffered? And worst of all, if somehow I was assaulted again, would they say, well then clearly there’s something wrong with her, not Brock, to get assaulted twice?

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.

As a woman, I’d tried asserting my opinion without coming off as self-serving or overcontrolling. So I repressed pissed-off victim. Now I wondered if I had handled it too gracefully, my composure a signal that what he’d done was of little consequence. When I’d advocated for him to take classes and be in therapy, she mistook it as a nurturing passivity, gentle absolution. What I meant was take note of his mental health, because in my experience, when men were upset, lonely, or neglected, we were killed.

My pain was never more valuable than his potential.

We live in a time where it has become difficult to distinguish between the President’s words and that of a nineteen-year-old assailant.

If she emerges, why don’t we ask her how it was possible she lived with that hurt for so long, ask who taught her to never uncover it.

Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on.