Life after Darkness: Finding Healing and Happiness after the Cleveland Kidnappings

164 Pages·2018·6.15 MB·English

by  Michelle Knight

Dedication
For Miguel, for all that he is.
And for Joey, wherever he is.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
1 Free!
2 An Impatient Patient
3 Transition: Assisted Living
4 On My Own—and in Search of Friends
5 Healing After Trauma
6 A New House and a New Love
7 Marriage and Home
8 Unfinished Business: Seeking My Roots, Planning My Future
9 A Life’s Work, a Soul’s Injury
10 Safe Circle
11 The Missing Child
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Resources
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Michelle Knight
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Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
I’m proud of my heart and who I have become . . .
My name is Lillian Rose Lee—Lily for short.
That is not the name I was born with. It is the name I was reborn with.
Lillian Rose Lee is the name I gave myself when I decided that I alone am in
control of my life, when I determined that no one else would ever have power
over me again.
Lillian Rose Lee is who I feel I am.
You may know me by another name: Michelle Knight. That was my name
when, at the age of twenty-one, I was kidnapped and held captive by a brutal and
probably insane man named Ariel Castro. For eleven years, nearly four thousand
days, I was chained, sexually abused, and beaten—day after day, months on end,
year after year. I lived in filth in a house without windows, was fed spoiled or
rotten food when I was fed at all, and was prevented from learning anything of
the outside world. I was impregnated five times, and five times Castro beat or
starved me into miscarriage. He kidnapped two other women as well; I was
chained to one of them for much of the time during those eleven years.
I was rescued on May 6, 2013. I walked out of that dark, filthy house of
horrors into the light and fell to my knees. I fell partly because after eleven years
of being immobilized I was physically weak and partly because I was almost
blinded by the sunshine. Mostly, I went down on my knees so I could thank God
I had survived. I was alive, and I was free.
That freedom felt like an explosion. Can you imagine what it was like, after
eleven years, to know I was no longer a prisoner bound with chains who had to
ask permission to move and who was afraid to say what I was thinking or risk
getting beaten? Now, all on my own, I could choose to sit or stand, to stay or go,
to talk or stay quiet. I could decide what I did, where I went, how I lived. I could
even create a life for myself, maybe a normal life, maybe a life in which I could
find happiness.
But if you had asked me then how to do that—how to come back from horror
and create a normal life—I would not have been able to answer you. I was free,
yes. Free in the sense that I knew that no one was going to rape me that day. Or
the next. Or the day after that. Or ever again. After what I had lived through,
knowing that the terror was over was like having the weight of the earth lifted
off my shoulders. But when it came to building a life after all the darkness I had
been through, I was basically starting from scratch. I had no idea how or where
to begin. Nothing in those eleven years and, frankly, little in my life before those
years had prepared me to seek or create a normal, happy life—nothing except a
survivor’s grit.
*
FIVE YEARS have passed since my rescue, and I know many of you have
wondered how I’ve gotten along and what has become of me. I regularly get
questions from readers of Finding Me, from people who know me through social
media, and from many people who simply remember the story of the “three
girls” from the house of horrors in Cleveland. They want to know how I’m doing
and what I’m doing. They ask about my son, Joey, about my relationship with
the other two women held captive with me, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry,
and about whether I have reconciled with my family. Fair questions, but the
answers are complicated.
They wonder also if I have confronted problems in moving forward, if I have
found a way to heal my wounds, and if I have been able to form any
relationships with men. I can tell you that in one sense, the answer to all three of
these questions is yes, but the stories behind those yeses can get pretty complex.
I realized it would take another book to answer these and other questions.
That’s the book you have in your hands right now.
*
THE WORLD I entered when I got out of captivity had moved on without me for
more than a decade. It was a strange new place. And I didn’t have a lot going for
me to help me navigate this new world.
For one thing, I was pretty sick. Gina and Amanda were released from the
hospital that we were all taken to a day after we were admitted. I was in and out
of hospitals for weeks.
Also, when Gina and Amanda were released from the hospital, they went
home. Their families greeted them with banners and celebrations, with hugs and
tears. I had no home to return to, no family to take me in. Most people think of
family as the people nearest and dearest to you, the people who nurture and
protect you. They think of home as a place of warmth and safety. I never had
such a family or such a home. Not even close. The household I grew up in was
never a safe haven; it’s where I was first harmed. My “family” was a collection
of people who came and went without caring or kindness. But I do recall one
grownup, a classmate’s mother, who showed me kindness and warmth. Her
name is Rose. I chose it as part of my own name for the new life I am creating.
The only family I was desperately longing to see was my son, Joey. He was
thirteen the day I walked out of Castro’s house. He had been taken from me even
before Castro took me from him. In fact, I was on my way to a meeting about
regaining custody of my son when I was abducted. But I always assumed that
freedom meant I would be able to find him again, that somehow we could be
reunited, and that I would truly be home. I didn’t know then and wouldn’t know
for several weeks that Joey had been adopted by a loving family years before. I
was not allowed to know where he was or anything about his new family.
So I was very much on my own as I lay in my hospital bed in Cleveland’s
MetroHealth Medical Center after being rescued. On my own and with few
resources. Yes, our rescue ignited an immediate and overwhelming public
response. My hospital room was soon flooded with gifts and flowers from
complete strangers, and donations to what was called the Cleveland Courage
Fund were enough to create trusts that still provide financial support. I will
always be grateful to all the people whose heartfelt help was so important to all
of us getting back on our feet. It was the first time I ever felt that people who
didn’t know me could care about me.
That realization warmed and strengthened me, but there were other realities
that weren’t so pretty. I was thirty-two years old and had lost all of my twenties
—probably the most robust years of any human being’s life—to Castro and
captivity. My body was broken. My heart was torn apart. My mind had been
challenged to its limits. I was frail and exhausted. And I was alone. I had a long
way to go and a lot of healing to do if I was to build a new life after darkness.
Healing doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process that takes time and moves
in stages. I had to nurse the wounds, some of them very deep, that went all the
way back to my childhood. I had to treat the injuries from years of suffering,
even if I couldn’t make the scars disappear. I had to soothe the pain and, in some
cases, such as the pain from the loss of my son, learn to live with it.
I made my share of mistakes along the way. There were people I trusted I
should not have trusted, things I did that I wish I could undo, moves I made I
would like to roll back. I can’t.
But survivor’s grit teaches you how to turn mistakes into strengths. I picked
myself up and kept going. And I had help along the way: legal help, financial
help, and a whole team of folks helping me put together Finding Me, then
helping me cope with the nuts and bolts of book tours and public appearances
and the celebrity that came with it.
And then there were the well-wishers. The people who came up to me after a
talk about abuse or domestic violence or missing children and thanked me. The
people who stopped me in the street and gave me a hug, the people who told me
I “inspired” them, the people who, to this day, shake my hand and tell me they
hope I will be reunited with my son. Every good wish, every warm thought
makes a difference.
*
SOMETHING ELSE has made a difference both in strengthening me and in helping
my healing process: the growing power of abuse victims to speak up and speak
out. Women especially—and never more so than in the months leading up to the
publication of this book—have found their voice when it comes to every form of
harassment, assault, and the misuse of power. Suddenly it seems that everywhere
you look—in entertainment, business, government, politics, sports—women and
girls are calling out the powerful men who demeaned them, hurt their careers,
created toxic work environments, abused their trust, dishonored their bodies.
I welcome all these women and girls to the fight that I too have been waging
since my rescue five years ago. I believe it is this swelling chorus of survivors’
voices that has brought about what I see as the beginning of a profound change
in perception and attitude around the country and the world. The cat is now out
of the bag: no one can ever again say they had no idea this was happening. The
more women and girls tell their stories, the more others who have suffered abuse
will hear it. The more they hear it, the more they will be encouraged to speak up
on their own behalf.
As you’ll read in the pages that follow, until every victim of abuse is able to
do that, I have made it my life’s work to speak out for them. Advocacy on behalf
of those who suffered or may now be suffering the kinds of physical, sexual, and
mental abuse that I suffered is today the inspiration of my life. Given my own
escape and the life I have made for myself after the darkness, I consider it a
blessing to be able to advocate while bringing hope to survivors, and I will
continue to do so as long as I am able.
*
BUT WHAT really has powered my healing and what graces the life I have built
after darkness is love. That is why this second book, Life After Darkness, is,
above all, a love story. Not just because it tells how I found “my sweetie,” the
love of my life and my soul’s companion. That was something I never even
dreamed possible when I was rescued. But it has happened, and it has been the
great happiness of my life.
At the same time this is a love story because it is about the power of love to
heal suffering and pain and to transform and empower us. I mean the love my
friend’s mother Rose showed me—a shining spark of light in a bleak and
otherwise loveless childhood that gave me strength. The love for my son that
steeled me to stay alive during eleven brutal years. The love of the true friends I
eventually did find who are now such a blessing in my life—my safe circle.
There is nothing better than knowing you are loved for yourself alone.
Above all, I mean the love I was able to open myself to that has magnified
the love I want to give—to the son I hope to find some day, to my friends, to my
husband, and to that other person deserving of love: myself. Love is what lights
up my life after darkness.