Assault Survivor Chanel Miller: Healing Isn’t Linear

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Just tell me how it feels to have a public recognition of your art right now.

CHANEL MILLER, ARTIST AND AUTHOR: Well, it’s been wonderful because the last five years of my life were really focused on shrinking and maintaining anonymity. And now, I finally shifted to the phase of total expansion and visibility. And I think the most wonderful part is that when a survivor services with their story, most people want to hear exclusively about those details of the case of the assault, and I think Asian American Museum approached me said, what else? You know, we’ll give you this huge blank wall, and they asked me to fill it with anything that came to my mind. So, they were asking me to expand on my story and tell them about the other parts of me that I had to offer.

AMANPOUR: Chanel, tell me about those figures. I mean, you know, you can pretty much guess what “I was, I am, I will be” represented, but just tell me how they were born from your pencil.

MILLER: I think about them as three interchangeable phases. I never think about healing as linear. I don’t think we can ever arrive anywhere. I know that no matter how successful I become or how healthy I am, there are still days where you will find me in the “I was” phase, revisiting the past or temporarily stuck in it, stuck in our inclined state. And so, I honor the fact that I live with sadness and that I’m OK being revisited by sadness, especially when I hear other survivor stories and that I don’t intend to eradicate those difficult feeling, to eradicate the anger, but instead to incorporate them into my life.