Here, the two discuss taking control of their own stories, finding glimmers of hope, and Nguyen’s upcoming Blue Origin flight, which would make her the first Southeast Asian woman to travel to space.

How did you decide on the framing device of this book?

Amanda Nguyen: I feel like I was holding on to my inner child throughout my life. Life’s purpose is to discover who you are, and sometimes you already knew when you were 5 [years old].

Writing the book was a meta process because I was writing about a healing journey, and writing about it helped me heal. Each of the stages of grief are set in these beautiful places, either favorite places I’ve been to or places I haven’t been to yet that I really want to go. Grief is such a difficult and painful thing to process. So if you had the choice, wouldn’t you want to be in the most beautiful places, to make it a little easier? And I also had these guides there because I wanted it to seem structured and also a little less scary, since there are people who help you through each of these stages. Grief is worth going through, and each stage of grief has a gift for you.

Chanel Miller: Children are incredibly observant, and they assign meaning and significance to objects or moments that we overlook. A kid can find a stick, take it home, and assign personal significance to it. That mindset helped me write because I felt like as an adult, society declares what milestones are meant to be significant for you—court dates, marriages, funerals—and when you’re writing about your own life, you have to sit with yourself and sift through all your memories to decide which moments are significant to you.

Amanda, I feel like I saw you learning about resilience by paying attention to nature and taking lessons from it. Can you talk about what you learned, not just from therapy or mentors, but from landscapes or the stars?

Saving Five

AN: The arc of my space flight is about healing. That dream is as much as about being able to accomplish whatever you want to as a kid as it is about not letting my identity be completely overridden by the cards that life handed me.

I try so hard to focus on little glimmers, textures that I appreciate in life. Chanel and I went on a nature walk and chose our favorite tree. It’s about learning to exercise the muscle of joy, because I think hope and joy are things that can be expanded by exercising them every day.

Amanda Nguyen

Why did you decide to include police documents and other primary sources in the book?

Amanda: I wanted the price tag of a rape kit to speak for itself, and I thought that there was no more powerful testament to how ridiculous it is than to see the itemized listing of it. There are places where survivors have to pay for it, and if they can’t pay, then they have creditors calling their homes. I [included] the emails from the police, from the forensic lab center, because I wanted people to go through what I was going through. The way that I experienced the criminal justice system was through these emails.

CM: There’s so much criticism of survivors when they don’t report. And that to me feels like pointing to a little shed in the distance and being like, “That’s the shed where you report. Just go there.” But nobody’s actually been there. And then you say, “Okay, fine, I’ll set off on this journey to this shed where the little justice jewel resides.” You start off on the journey and you’re like, “Oh, there’s an alligator boat and there’s a pit of daggers and a pool of lava.” You have to go to a hospital that gives a forensic exam, not any hospital. You have to go to the police station for the report. Then you have to go to the actual court system to see if anyone will even take your case, if there’s enough evidence.

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

It really bothered me that people are always saying, “Well, why didn’t you just report it?” When I want them to sit down with me and give me a play-by-play of how I would’ve proceeded and how many opportunities there are to be snuffed out along the way and for Amanda to get the excruciating rape kit done in the allotted time frame, and then have that casually expire if you’re not on top of it. There’s so much that’s already stacked against you. The average person can’t even navigate the DMV and you want us to go through this while carrying an almost impossible emotional burden and being terror-filled—that is so unreasonable.

#MeToo relied on people to excavate their personal trauma and come forward with their stories. But I understand the many reasons why people would not want to. How do you feel about this pressure falling on the individual as opposed to a focus on systemic change?

AN: I think the biggest banner that I see right now is 1 percent conviction rate. I don’t believe that a perfect victim exists, because we are [expected] to have to be outspoken but demure in a way that didn’t invite violence to us. There’s always something that someone will find as a character assassination point, which, by the way, is a lot of the defense tactics that are used against sexual assault survivors.

So whether it be what you were wearing, what you were consuming, ultimately these are such red herrings because nothing excuses violence. People will ask, “What do you say to a survivor who may be scared about reporting?” And I say that’s completely your choice. There is no right or wrong because there’s a 1 percent conviction rate. If somebody feels like they need to speak up, then I support that. And if for whatever reason they need to not speak up, I support that too.

Chanel Miller

CM: We both have achieved certain versions of justice, but there’s still so much pain. For me, what the verdict did was help me feel less insane. It wasn’t even about punishing him, it was about confirming my reality. And when you have the 1 percent conviction rate, it’s not only that the assailants are getting away with it—it’s that the survivor can be really hurt by people telling them “what happened to you is not real unless you have it confirmed in the form of a verdict.”

In the wake of the election and the appointments that Trump is making, I’ve seen people express some version of the sentiment that “being found liable for sexual abuse will not keep you from the highest office in the land.” How do you find hope and find ways to still move forward?

AN: I understand the pain that so many people feel when they see that the people who are in power are not held accountable for the violence that they have done. But I still have so much hope, and that’s because of the work that my team and I have done over the past 10 years, passing laws in places like Alabama and Mississippi, convincing all 196 member states in the UN to sign on to [a resolution supporting justice for survivors].

I don’t feel hopelessness at all. I think the greatest gift my activism has ever given me was knowing that our stories really do matter. That if we want to change the law, we can. And of course it matters who’s elected, but that change can happen no matter who is sitting there.

CM: For so long I carried so much self-loathing and shame. I was asking myself, “Am I good?” Now, when I look at some of our authority figures, I think, “What the heck?” So I was like, “I’ve got to be nicer to myself and let go of all of that self-imposed weight and criticism and scrutiny.” In a strange way, I became more emboldened to step up to these powers.

I do speaking engagements all over the country. I’ll get picked up at an airport by someone who runs a local domestic violence shelter. Their work does not waver based on what is happening politically. They’re showing up every day, no matter the person in office. I try to tap into that for myself and understand the work that I need to do and not get too swept away and what I cannot control. And it’s such a privilege to see people in these little pockets of every state doing incredible work.

Amanda, you have said that you receive thousands of messages a month from survivors; Chanel, I’m sure you have as well. How do you hold the responsibility of that while also setting a boundary?

AN: Every time that I do a speaking engagement, inevitably there will be survivors who come up and share. It is such a privilege. And also, I’m so grateful to my therapist for helping me develop the tool of visualizing a trauma shield. No matter what somebody is sharing, whatever energy it is, it is kind of like a wave that comes up to the shield and splatters. It doesn’t touch you.

Every time a survivor shares their story, I feel like they’re handing over a coal. And it is a weight that I accept, but it also keeps my rage alive, and that fuel has propelled a lot of my activism.

Amanda Nguyen

CM: One of the most powerful things that a young woman shared with me is that when she was 16, my victim impact statement is what took her hand and led her to tell her mom [about her own assault]. It helped me understand that it’s not my job to directly help and see everyone through their own journeys, but my work is what helps them realize that they deserve assistance and support and to pursue it in their lives.

Amanda, when you said “trauma shield,” I wanted to ask you about trauma time, because we’re both just about a decade past our assaults, and it’s astonishing, but it’s also sometimes sad because I was focused on surviving for so long and then I look up and 10 years have passed. Society is always encouraging people to move on and let things go and put it behind you. But talking to other survivors, I understand that trauma time is so strange and slow and you absolutely cannot rush how long it will take to heal from certain things.

AN: I think of my life before and after. A lot of people can think about their lives like, “I went to high school and then college, and then I have this job.” And it is literally for me: pre-assault, post-assault. I think in large part it’s because right after it, it was a chemical change in every single facet of my life in what I decided to do, I lived, breathed, ate this. It was something that consumed every waking moment of my life. It alchemized my reality.

And because of that, it has felt like I have been on this bullet train with a singular goal of saving that kid and then saving the nation, all these kids around the nation and then the world. I felt like a curse broke when I passed the UN resolution. And the biggest curse was after the federal law [was passed]. That’s when I feel like the clock started ticking again to me.

CM: After my assault, I felt like my life was in the wrong genre: a true-crime life. And by writing and applying storytelling and art and family history, all the texture of me and my schooling and experience to the traumatic event, I love watching the people in the center of these stories transform how these stories are being told.

AN: After I left the hospital, I wrote a note: “Never, never, never give up.” I still have it. And I know that as soon as I hit microgravity and the buzzer goes off, I will be floating that note in the window. That moment is the arc of keeping my promise to myself that when I left my astronaut dreams, I would not forget the person I was before I was hurt. I actually have to figure out how to not lose vision because I will be sobbing.

If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, help is available 24/7 through the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE and online.rainn.org, y en español rainn.org/es.