ID: Silhouettes of a bed and IV pole below the title Wrongfully Imprisoned Reflections on the Epiphany of Amanda Knox. New Blog Post sticker in the lower right corner.
Amanda Knox recently wrote a Twitter thread about her experience coming to terms with her wrongful imprisonment. In 2007, Amanda Knox, an American exchange student in Italy, was convicted of killing her roommate. She spent four years in Italian prison, released in 2011. It wasn’t until 2015, another four years later, that she was exonerated by Italy's highest court.
In this thread she describes the epiphany she had, while imprisoned, of realizing that this is her life, right now. As a chronically ill, disabled person who has been bed bound for months at a time, I really relate to that experience. I encourage you to read the thread in its entirety. I have included screenshots below. For a plain text version, please click here.
Reading this account of her epiphany felt oddly familiar. I’ve had that same epiphany over and over. I want to be clear that I can never even begin to imagine what being imprisoned is like, especially in a foreign country. I can’t imagine the desire to prove her innocence, or the frustration at the fact that her fate was beyond her control. Knox closes her thread with “Everyone is going through something, even when they’re smiling. If that sounds like you, I hope reading this helps.” In my opinion, it helps. It helps me to see other people choosing to move forward in the face of great adversity. This is why I feel that comparing the similarity of our experiences helps illuminate them both, highlighting our connections, across criminal and disability justice movements, and continents.
I have edited her thoughts, omitting some parts and changing others (in blue ink) to explain my experience. What I noticed was how much of her statement I was able to leave unedited.
After I was at my most sick, bed bound for months, losing weight rapidly, and fearing the worst, when the earth dropped out from beneath me, and shame rained down on top of me, I had my first ever epiphany.
I didn’t know what an epiphany should feel like, but it was…cold. Like a clear breeze blowing in and brushing the back of your neck, making your hairs stand up.
I knew something deep down that I hadn’t known before, and I spent the next several months peering into that epiphany, trying to consider all of its implications, like watching the ripples spread out from a drop of water in a pool.
My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed before accepting that my chronic illness had tipped into disability, waiting to get my life back. I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home. I was disabled, and doctor’s appointments were my home.
I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life I was living). I wasn’t. I never had been.
The new diagnosis, weekly infusions, lost weight, —*this* was my life. There was no life I *should* have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me.
The epiphany itself didn’t feel good or bad. It was just true. If there was a feeling, it was the feeling of fact, and it came with the next logical conclusion: my life was sad.
I was imprisoned for a crime I didn’t commit. I would be chronically ill and disabled for the rest of my life, and deprived of opportunities many of us take for granted: walking unassisted, having children, pursuing a career. My world would be so small, trapped within these walls.
And this life would inevitably take me further and further down a path that would be different from most of the people I loved, who, despite their best efforts to be there for me, were on their own paths moving in very different directions.
The feeling of clarity, though, was in realizing that however small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life felt, it was *my* life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now.
I was alone with my epiphany. I tried to explain it to my friends and family, but some couldn’t hear me. They thought I was depressed and giving up. They could not, and would not, accept that *this* was my life. I was going to get better and they just needed me to survive until I did.
I told them I would, and it wasn’t a lie. I *would* survive. I knew that, deep in my bones. But I knew that precisely because I had finally accepted that I was living *my* life, whether I was eventually any healthier, or not.
I allowed myself to begin to imagine alternate realities. What if I hadn’t gotten the virus that awakened my Dysautonomia? What if I was able to work in five years? In ten?
What if I never made it outside again, or even left my bed? What if I killed myself…
I imagined all of those futures in vivid detail so that they no longer felt like shadows creeping over me from the realm of unconscious nightmares. And that allowed me to see my actual life for what it was, and to ask myself: How do I make *that* life worth living?
That was a big question, one I couldn't answer in its grandest sense. But there was a smaller version of that question: How can I make my life worth living *today?* I could answer that question, repeatedly.
That was entirely in my power. So I did that. Sitting in a chair, walking laps, writing a blog post, reading a book – these things were enough to make a day worth living. I didn’t know if they were enough to make a life worth living, but I remained open and curious to the possibility.
And while my new emotional default setting remained firmly stuck on sad—I woke up sad, spent the entire day sad, and went to sleep sad—it wasn’t a desperate, grasping sadness.
It was a sadness brimming with energy beneath the surface, because I was alive with myself, and the freeing feeling of seeing reality clearly, however sad that reality felt.
I was slowly and deliberately walking a tightrope across a bottomless foggy abyss, with no clue where I was going and nothing to hold onto but my strong, instinctual sense of balance.
In many ways, I am now healthier and in many ways I am not. But Disability Justice has taught me that no matter my circumstance (being bed bound, hospitalized, non-verbal, blind, deaf, etc) I am whole with meaning and worth inherently… even though I’m still walking that tightrope.
The abyss never leaves. It’s always there. And anyone who’s stared into it, as I have, knows the strange comfort and weight of carrying it with you.
Everyone is going through something, even when they're smiling. If that sounds like you, I hope reading this helps.
Our experiences were very different and yet there was a surprising amount of overlap. We both sought to build a life rooted in meaning and our values, even with extreme limitations and traumatic losses.
Knox’s epiphany made me think of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, a book about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. In it, Frankl wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Changing ourselves is exactly what Knox is writing about. Her epiphany sounds like a complete change of perspective.
My change of perspective came from devouring essays and books on Disability Justice and being in spaces with other disabled people. This new knowledge and perspective changed the way I viewed myself and my disability. In addition, I began to understand through meditation that all I had before me was the present moment. This extreme flare of my illness had felt like a departure from my life. But it was my life. It was all my life. Even if I was living it from my bed.
I’m so grateful that Knox shared her experience with us. Seeing glimpses of ourselves in each other helps us to feel less alone. Seeing people in situations some may consider unimaginable, describing their process of finding meaning is powerful and valuable. Many of us are suffering, in ways big and small. I think we thrive when we are able to hold our suffering in community.
Like many global citizens, at some point, over the last sixteen years I’d read about her case. I had never before considered our similarities. Seeing the reaction to her thread, it seems many people hadn’t. So thank you, Amanda Knox, seeing the ways we are more similar than different is an important message. It’s empowering to know we’re all walking our own tightropes across a bottomless foggy abyss.
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