"I did what any victim does instinctively. I went into hiding. I made myself smaller, in the hopes he couldn’t see me. Well-meaning friends would offer to go with me places, offer to go to places for me. When I decided to do my first author appearance after I won my restraining order, those offers shifted to concern and outrage. Is it safe for you to be in public? What if he shows up? What if he sends someone else and you’re trapped there at your table? What if he follows you home? And I realized that by simply trying to live my life again, I was now seen as reckless, a new set of bars on my cage made by the well- intentioned. All I wanted was to take some small measure of my life back, one tiny thing that was mine against the mountain of things he’d stolen. But the silent -and in some cases not so silent- judgement I encountered made it clear that if in doing so, I somehow antagonized him… well then, the fault was mine." -Dana McSwain

Atherton Review vol. 107

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