The Voice in Your Head Isn’t Alone

I was absolutely convinced—convinced—that I was going to find the golden nugget of human understanding in a military prison.

Not gold, not glory, not even a decent cup of coffee—no.
I wanted to know why adult men (because, statistically speaking, that was the population) commit sexual assault.

Casual curiosity, right?

So I gathered with other researchers—very impressive people with degrees made up of so many letters it looked like someone fell asleep on a keyboard. Not because letters make you smart, but because they make you curious… and maybe a little stubborn.

And into the storm we went.

One by one, the men came into the room.
And there I was—heart beating somewhere outside my chest, trying to look calm, collected… like I wasn’t internally screaming, “What am I doing here?”

I walked into their space, but really, I was walking into something much bigger:
Who were these men before the violence?
Before the power, the harm, the labels?

And here’s the inconvenient, deeply uncomfortable truth:
They were… human.

Yeah. I know.
Not the plot twist anyone asked for.

They were like you.
They were like me.
A spark. A beginning. A life that didn’t just “go wrong” one day, but kept moving, shaping, reacting—just like all of ours do.

Which is wildly annoying, because it means we have to widen our perspective on “good” and “evil” instead of neatly filing people into emotional folders labeled safe and monster.

Most people don’t want to do that.
Not because they’re bad—but because they’re afraid.

Take my husband, for example.
A brilliant man. A Stanford University graduate in mechanical engineering—not medicine, mind you—because he is absolutely, unapologetically terrified of blood.

Blood.
The very thing currently circulating in his body as he stands there, being afraid of it.

Terrified.

And honestly? Respect. That’s commitment.

But that’s the thing—curiosity will take you places intelligence politely declines.
Curiosity says, “Let’s go.”
Fear says, “Let’s absolutely not.”

And the curious ones?
We walk in anyway.

We “enter sandman,” we enter life, we enter the messy, uncomfortable, morally confusing middle where things stop being neat and start being real.

Where someone else’s life starts to feel… uncomfortably close to our own.

Where you realize:
That life is not separate from mine.

And it doesn’t get more bizarre than that.

Because here I was—someone who had been sexually assaulted for so much of my life that memory itself felt stitched together with it.
The smells.
The moments.
Even something as simple as a leather jacket holding more history than it ever asked for.

And now—here I was.
Face to face with the very kind of life that had harmed me.

And I wasn’t afraid.

Not because it didn’t matter.
Not because it was okay.

But because in that moment, something deeper than fear showed up.

I was human.

Fully, undeniably human.
With life moving through me—not around me, not despite me, but through me.

And (wait for it)…
through them, too.