am. If I was larger, at that moment, I would have torn him apart.
—“I DON’T KNOW WHAT you’ve done to your wrist,” Dad told me the next
morning, “but you’re no good on the crew like that. You might as well
head back to Utah.”
The drive to BYU was hypnotic; by the time I arrived, my memories
of the previous day had blurred and faded.
They were brought into focus when I checked my email. There was a
message from Shawn. An apology. But he’d apologized already, in my
room. I had never known Shawn to apologize twice.
I retrieved my journal and I wrote another entry, opposite the first,
in which I revised the memory. It was a misunderstanding, I wrote. If
I’d asked him to stop, he would have.
But however I chose to remember it, that event would change
everything. Reflecting on it now I’m amazed by it, not by what
happened, but that I wrote what happened. That from somewhere
inside that brittle shell—in that girl made vacant by the fiction of
invincibility—there was a spark left.
The words of the second entry would not obscure the words of the
first. Both would remain, my memories set down alongside his. There
was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either
the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to
weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It
is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in
your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if
the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or
rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim
certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was
narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic,
absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong
as theirs.