Reclaiming You — Thank You, Chanel Miller

Mariah Tiffany

”But the incredible thing is that a victim is also the smiling girl in a green apron making your coffee, she just handed you your change. She just taught a class of first graders. She has her headphones in, tapping her foot on the subway. Victims are all around you.” 

Identities are sacred to the human soul. They represent who we are and how we wish to present ourselves to the world. We are always shifting and constantly changing, all in hopes to become better than we were yesterday.

And yet, when you become a victim of an unspeakable and unfathomable crime, your identity is stolen from you. Trauma rips away any hope you once had for a more promising future by succumbing you with an overwhelm of grief and shame, leaving you feeling ever so distant from the woman you used to be and perhaps dreamt you still were. 

Assault changes you. It alters your heart. It stunts your growth and weakens your faith. And it especially makes you feel separate from the life you once lived and the body or the world you are trying to call home again. 

”The statement had created a room, a place for survivors to step into and speak aloud their heaviest truths, to revisit the untouched parts of their past.”

Viking Press

Emily Doe expressed how she lived through these same experiences in her famous victim impact statement read by over 11 million people in 2016. Now, she is reclaiming her name, her voice and her identity in a new memoir titled Know My Name, where she introduces herself to the world, separate from the image that planted her in victimhood, as the stunningly gracious Chanel Miller. 

”The strange thing is, coming out to someone I don’t know is easy. Coming out to someone I know is much harder. Perhaps because they contain pockets of your past; who you were, what they believed you to be. It’s hard to watch those ideas dissolve to reconfigure around this new identity. When I tell a loved one, I watch their eyes. They are searching, as if waiting for me to tell them it’s not true.”

Chanel Miller

When I first picked up Know My Name, I was immediately drawn to the depth of the forest green sleeve wrapped ever so elegantly in delicate gold foil. I later learned that the design stems from a kind of Japanese art known as Kintsugi, “...a process that makes a new, beautiful object out of what’s been broken, emphasizing where it has cracked.” 

I remember looking down at the book and thinking ‘I am going to finish this in no time.’ And yes, although I was gripped to the story since the very beginning, hours turned into days and days turned into weeks. It ended up taking me over a month to finish entirely, mostly because I found myself so overwhelmed by the truth and reality of Chanel’s experiences that I often had to take a take a step back, feel what was meant to be felt and honor the reactions I was having to her survival story. 

”I believe that’s what being a victim is, living with that little finicky, darting thing inside you. Most people say development is linear, but for survivors it is cyclic. People grow up, victims grow around; we strengthen around that place of hurt, become older and fuller, but the vulnerable core is never gone.”

As a survivor, you begin to see your life in two paradigms — one before the assault and one after the assault. What survivors lose as a result is immense and boundless. Chanel perfectly describes that you often engage in “...negative self-talk, blaming ourselves for the trauma…” and that “Assault buries the self. We lose sight of how and when we are allowed to occupy space. We are made to doubt our abilities, disparaged when we speak.” 

”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 a 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.”

Chanel details many vulnerable moments in her book, such as times when she found herself feeling overwhelmed and running behind closed doors at public gatherings, shoulders quivering and tears streaming down her face. Addressing her abuser directly, she even illustrates, “You made me a victim... I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am... I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth something.” 

As a reader, one of the most emotional journeys in Chanel’s story is that of her rape trial. I was stunned by the reality that her pain was not enough evidence, even though the case had everything it needed to put him away for a long time. And yet, when it came to the judge’s final decision, the witnesses, the facts and Chanel’s turmoil were thrown into the wind as if they never mattered.

"I put the memory of that morning inside a large jar. I took this jar and carried it down, down, down, flights and flights of stairs, placing it inside a cabinet, locking it away, and walking briskly back up the stairs to continue with the life I had built, the one that had nothing to do with him, or what he could ever do to me. The jar was gone.” 

There was no appreciation of trauma and especially no understanding of its lasting heartbreak on the judge’s behalf. And so rather than emphasizing with the victim and the strong-willed survivor before him, he took the side of a boy who undermined a woman’s personal freedom for his own pleasure. Chanel will live with this trauma forever, while he will go on never fully grasping the consequences of his own actions.

This is often the reality of so many survivors, who always seem to receive less than what they deserve. It mirrors various cases Chanel highlighted in her memoir, including victims of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, who proved just how powerful strength in numbers can be. She expressed appreciation for the bravery of over one hundred young girls assaulted by disgraced former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. And she spoke about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, highlighting the way she spoke so eloquently and captivated Chanel’s gratitude during one of the times she was struggling the most.

Amazingly, she devoted pieces of her memoir to express how she felt discovering that her story had influenced the political world. Hillary Clinton, who famously quoted Chanel’s victim impact statement in her post-election book What Happened, wrote, “On nights when you feel alone, I am with you... Early on the morning of November 9th, when it came time to decide on what I’d say in my concession speech, I remembered those words. Inspired by them, I wrote these: ‘To all the little girls watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every change and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams. Wherever she is, I hope Emily Doe knows how much her words and her strength meant to so many.’”

Chanel also received a letter from former Vice President and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, in which he wrote, “I see you. I see the limitless potential of an incredibly talented young woman — full of possibility. I see the shoulders on which our dreams for the future rest. You have given them the strength they need to fight. And so, I believe, you will save lives.”

”We may spend half our time wandering around, wondering what we’re even doing here, why it’s worth the effort. But living is an incredible thing, just to have been here, to have felt, if only briefly, the volume and depth of others’ empathy. I wrote, most of all, to tell you I have seen how good the world could be.”

These letters and honors were only a few out of the hundreds of thousands of outreach proposals to Chanel, some of which may have been from some of the highest leaders in our nation while others were sent by mothers and teachers and survivors of all ages, all of whom helped give her the strength to continue meeting each new day. 

”I wrote because there were times I did not feel like living.”

”I do not write to trigger victims. I write to comfort them, and I’ve found that victims identity more with pain than platitudes. When I write about weakness, about how I am barely getting through this, my hope is that they feel better, because it aligns with the truth they are living.”

I trust that it was the consideration of other survivors feeling just as alone and confused as she has that inspired her to sit and write and offer the world this stunning gift — both her true story as well as the incredibly talented writer and artist we are so blessed to now have. Towards the end of her book, Chanel beautifully expressed, “Writing is the way I process the world. When I was given the opportunity to write this book, whatever God up there said, ”You got your dream’. I said, ‘Actually I was hoping for a lighter topic’, and God was like, ‘Ha ha! You thought you got to choose’. This was the topic I was given.”

I am sure it is safe to say that, on behalf of the hearts of so many survivors, Chanel Miller is a heroine and vision we are eternally grateful for and incredibly blessed to admire. While I urge anyone and everyone to read the memoir that has now become one of the most beloved additions to my library, I’d like to end with Chanel’s own words on healing, which I trust many of us can gather more insight on no matter the kind of truths we hold… 

”I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. 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. I did it, I am here. 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.”

”I never could have known that, after college, I’d be assaulted within seven months... weep during testimony, write twelve pages that would resonate globally... and spend two and a half years writing. I have created a self inside the suffering. Looking back, the assault is now inextricable from the greater story. It is a fact of my life, the same way I was born in June, and I was raped in January. Awful feelings may remain the same, but my capacity to handle them has grown. I can’t tell you what happens next because I have not lived it. 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.”

To follow Chanel’s journey, see her Instagram @ChanelMillerKnowMyName or visit her website at www.chanel-miller.com.