Grace’s Story
Grace grew up in a home filled with love. Adopted as an infant, she was "daddy’s little girl," raised by a mother and father who doted on her. But even in a house full of warmth, Grace felt a cold sense of "otherness." She was an indigenous child in a world where she didn't see herself reflected; she was a self-described "chubby kid with glasses" who felt the sting of schoolyard taunts. She hid her insecurities behind an outgoing personality and a streak of perfectionism, trying to be the "good kid" everyone expected her to be.
That all shattered when she was 11 years old.
While walking home from a fair at dusk, Grace accepted a ride from a stranger. This adult man took her to a secluded location and raped her. This assault changed her forever. At an age when most children are beginning to discover who they are, Grace "knew" who she was: she felt dirty, worthless, and fundamentally bad.
When she transitioned to junior high, she stopped hanging out with the honor roll students and started seeking out the outcasts. She said, "I saw the kids that were broken, and I thought now, I was broken too." She never told anyone about the assault until much later in life.
The decades that followed were a blur of survival. Grace fled home at 15, seeking refuge in the "biker" scene and falling into a cycle of relationships with men decades older than her. She became a mother at 16, then again at 18, navigating a life of "bopping around the country" and heavy drinking to numb the pain of a past she had never told a soul about.
By 2004, when Grace was 41 years old and trying to build a stable life working at a Dunkin’ Donuts, trauma found her again. During a 5:00 a.m. opening shift when she was alone, she was robbed and raped by a stranger in the parking lot. This second massive assault broke her further; she attempted suicide and, for the first time, traded alcohol for the numbing fog of crack cocaine.
But between 2006 and 2010, she found sobriety. She began working in the recovery field, helping others find the path she had struggled to walk. But life remained relentless. Her mother suffered a debilitating stroke, and the weight of caregiving, combined with a failing relationship and the loss of her job, pushed Grace to a breaking point.
On a Sunday night in 2010, she made a fateful decision to walk into a bar, thinking she could have one night of indulging in addiction, then return to "business as usual" the next morning.
By the end of the night, Grace was profoundly intoxicated. When a physical argument broke out with a male bartender over a drink for her son, the man put his hands on her. She reported that her immediate, consuming thought was that "he’s going to kill me and he’s going to rape me." In that split second, Grace’s brain didn't see a bartender in a bar - it saw the man from the fair when she was 11; it saw the man in the parking lot from 2004.
Grace, a woman of small stature, who was now convinced she was about to be raped or killed, reached for a knife in her purse. She struck out in a blind panic and ran from the scene. It wasn't until the police arrived later and she was arrested hours later that she learned the man had died.
