What was unique about this crime, was that the perpetrator could suggest the victim experienced pleasure and people wouldn’t bat an eye. There’s no such thing as a good stabbing or bad stabbing, consensual murder or nonconsensual murder.

Victims are often, automatically, accused of lying. But when a perpetrator is exposed of lying, the stigma doesn’t stick. Why is it that we’re wary of victims making false accusations, but rarely consider how many men have blatantly lied about, downplayed, or manipulated others to cover their own actons?

Maybe now you are terrified, bobbing inside the clear plastic container around you, thinking, I am trapped, this is not how it’s supposed to be. Just remember: the temperature is slowly changing, you are adjusting. You will make it into that pond. With a little more time, you’ll be free.

Privilege accompanies the light skinned, helped maintained 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?

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 can be.

I’d been living with two teacups filled to the brim behind each eye, gotten used to a little spilling over every now and then.

There is a certain carefree feeling that was stripped from me the night of the assault. How to distinguish spontaneity from recklessness? How to prove nudity is not synonymous with promiscuity? Where’s the line between caution and paranoia? This is what I’m mourning, this is what I do not know how to get back.

I am not a burden. I am not limited, I am ever expanding. Your suffering means something. You are worth more than three months. They could never truly have rejected me since they had never fully known me. You are worth more than three months. The assault was never all of me.

She said to the women, Leave your pain here and go out and do your magnificent things. I didn’t know instructions like this were possible.

History is where you will find people who have been through what you’re experiencing. Not only been there but survived it. Not only survived it but changed it. Whose struggles informed them. History shows you what people have endured before you.