The Memoir

I started writing again. Not the journal entries I’d been keeping, but a book. A memoir. My story, told in my own words, for anyone who wanted to read it.

I wrote about the judge. The sentence. The stripping. The exposure. The trauma. I wrote about the men who’d looked, who’d touched, who’d tried to break me. I wrote about the women who’d stood by me, the activists who’d fought for me, the strangers who’d believed in me.

And I wrote about the blue dress. The dress I’d bought for three dollars, the dress that had given me a moment of hope.

I wrote about the reclamation. The moment I’d realized that I wasn’t broken, that I was just reshaped. That I could choose to be whole again.

The book was published a year later. It was a modest success, nothing flashy, nothing blockbuster. But it reached people. It touched people. It started conversations that needed to happen.

I was no longer just the naked girl. I was the survivor. The author. The woman who’d refused to be broken.