Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

I don’t regret it. It was a choice that honored my own dignity and his. But it was not perfect. It was hard and ugly and devastating. It was also powerful. I didn’t get the accountability I had hoped for, but I learned. I grew. I noticed patterns and coping skills. I saw the harm caused by my own isolation and sense of responsibility. I grew up working class, the girl child of a single mother struggling with addiction. I learned early about responsibility. My life, my mother’s life, depended on it. By age three I had been put into foster care after the violence of her boyfriend’s hand was no longer ignorable. I learned to be silent but strong. I made myself invisible and never questioned my ability to survive alone. In the end, that was most damaging. Doing it alone. Believing it was all my responsibility. Not the assault. But the healing. The justice. The protection of nameless other girls. I leaned heavy into the skills I learned as a child, over responsibility, independence, sharp analysis, and self-sacrifice. Which meant I never asked for the support I was so desperate for. Because what I needed, maybe more than his apology, was a community of people who could help me hold and honor all the stories that led to this one, who could help me uproot the layers of silence learned through too much violence. I needed to be asked what I wanted and what I was hoping for. I needed someone to help me craft those letters, someone to remind me that I could list expectations. I neede...