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Shame and an event I don’t want to talk about. It made me feel responsible- guilty, although it wasn’t my fault.

Then came the photograph—
something I never asked for,
something sent with disrespect,
and somehow the police were called on me.

The story turned inside out.

I became the person being watched.

So I ran.

For months I hitchhiked,
moving from road to road,
trying to outrun fear,
trying to outrun a world
that had already decided
what I was supposed to be.

Eventually, I stole my father’s work van.

I was arrested.

And inside that place,
fear followed me.

In the common area
my anxiety became unbearable.

Four male guards
took me down.

I remember the force of them,
the panic,
the crushing weight—

my ribcage cracked beneath me.

After that,
my memory becomes broken glass.

There are months
I cannot completely retrieve.

Six months of bullying.

A girl named Heather
put chemicals on my washcloth.

The burning was unbearable.

Officer K. Facinelli
threatened to tase me
while I was in my cell.

Then they threw me in the hole—

not because I had committed
some violent act,

but because they said
I wasn’t cooperating.

I was terrified.

They called it psychiatric.

They tested me.

And tested me again.

The tests came back normal.

Even my PTSD
did not give them
the answer they seemed determined to find.

Still, the old diagnosis remained:

schizophrenia.

A diagnosis connected to words
I had once spoken to a doctor
out of fear—

symptoms I had lied about
because I was afraid
of what would happen
if I told the truth.

Fear can make you say things
you don’t mean.

Fear can make you disappear
inside your own story.

And in that hospital
I was afraid again.

I was attacked by people
who were supposed to care for me.

Later, I read in a newspaper
that another resident
had been sexually assaulted
in that hospital
while I was there.

I remember the realization:

I wasn’t wrong to be afraid.

Fear had been everywhere.

In cells.

In hallways.

In uniforms.

In diagnoses.

In the hands of people
who were supposed to protect me.

For a long time
I thought those months
had taken something from me
that I could never recover.

Maybe they did.

But they did not take everything.

They did not take my voice, although now it shakes with tremors. 

They did not take my ability
to tell the truth now.

They did not take
the woman I would become.

I am thirty-eight now.

And when I look backward,
I don’t only see the woman
running down the road.

I see someone
desperate to survive.

Someone carrying a wound
too large for language.

Someone whose body remembered
what her mind could not.

Someone who kept breathing.

Someone who kept going.

Someone who eventually
found her way out.

I cannot rewrite
what happened to me.

But I can write
what happened next.

I survived the fear.

I survived the arrest.

I survived the cracked ribs.

I survived the bullying.

I survived the burning.

I survived the threats.

I survived the hole.

I survived the diagnosis
that did not tell my whole story.

I survived the hospital.

And I am still here.

The wound is part of my history.

But it is not the end of it.

I am more than what happened to me.

And every day I live,

I become the answer

to everything

that tried

to break me.