Preface

I’m proud of my heart and who I have become…

My name is Lillian Rose Lee—Lily for short.

That is not the name I was born with. It is the name I was reborn with.

Lillian Rose Lee is the name I gave myself when I decided that I alone am in control of my life, when I determined that no one else would ever have power over me again.

Lillian Rose Lee is who I feel I am.

You may know me by another name: Michelle Knight. That was my name when, at the age of twenty-one, I was kidnapped and held captive by a brutal and probably insane man named Ariel Castro. For eleven years, nearly four thousand days, I was chained, sexually abused, and beaten—day after day, months on end, year after year. I lived in filth in a house without windows, was fed spoiled or rotten food when I was fed at all, and was prevented from learning anything of the outside world. I was impregnated five times, and five times Castro beat or starved me into miscarriage. He kidnapped two other women as well; I was chained to one of them for much of the time during those eleven years.

I was rescued on May 6, 2013. I walked out of that dark, filthy house of horrors into the light and fell to my knees. I fell partly because after eleven years of being immobilized I was physically weak and partly because I was almost blinded by the sunshine. Mostly, I went down on my knees so I could thank God I had survived. I was alive, and I was free.

That freedom felt like an explosion. Can you imagine what it was like, after eleven years, to know I was no longer a prisoner bound with chains who had to ask permission to move and who was afraid to say what I was thinking or risk getting beaten? Now, all on my own, I could choose to sit or stand, to stay or go, to talk or stay quiet. I could decide what I did, where I went, how I lived. I could even create a life for myself, maybe a normal life, maybe a life in which I could find happiness.

But if you had asked me then how to do that—how to come back from horror and create a normal life—I would not have been able to answer you. I was free, yes. Free in the sense that I knew that no one was going to rape me that day. Or the next. Or the day after that. Or ever again. After what I had lived through, knowing that the terror was over was like having the weight of the earth lifted off my shoulders. But when it came to building a life after all the darkness I had been through, I was basically starting from scratch. I had no idea how or where to begin. Nothing in those eleven years and, frankly, little in my life before those years had prepared me to seek or create a normal, happy life—nothing except a survivor’s grit.

FIVE YEARS have passed since my rescue, and I know many of you have wondered how I’ve gotten along and what has become of me. I regularly get questions from readers of Finding Me, from people who know me through social media, and from many people who simply remember the story of the “three girls” from the house of horrors in Cleveland. They want to know how I’m doing and what I’m doing. They ask about my son, Joey, about my relationship with the other two women held captive with me, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry, and about whether I have reconciled with my family. Fair questions, but the answers are complicated.

They wonder also if I have confronted problems in moving forward, if I have found a way to heal my wounds, and if I have been able to form any relationships with men. I can tell you that in one sense, the answer to all three of these questions is yes, but the stories behind those yeses can get pretty complex.

I realized it would take another book to answer these and other questions. That’s the book you have in your hands right now.

THE WORLD I entered when I got out of captivity had moved on without me for more than a decade. It was a strange new place. And I didn’t have a lot going for me to help me navigate this new world.

For one thing, I was pretty sick. Gina and Amanda were released from the hospital that we were all taken to a day after we were admitted. I was in and out of hospitals for weeks.

Also, when Gina and Amanda were released from the hospital, they went home. Their families greeted them with banners and celebrations, with hugs and tears. I had no home to return to, no family to take me in. Most people think of family as the people nearest and dearest to you, the people who nurture and protect you. They think of home as a place of warmth and safety. I never had such a family or such a home. Not even close. The household I grew up in was never a safe haven; it’s where I was first harmed. My “family” was a collection of people who came and went without caring or kindness. But I do recall one grownup, a classmate’s mother, who showed me kindness and warmth. Her name is Rose. I chose it as part of my own name for the new life I am creating.

The only family I was desperately longing to see was my son, Joey. He was thirteen the day I walked out of Castro’s house. He had been taken from me even before Castro took me from him. In fact, I was on my way to a meeting about regaining custody of my son when I was abducted. But I always assumed that freedom meant I would be able to find him again, that somehow we could be reunited, and that I would truly be home. I didn’t know then and wouldn’t know for several weeks that Joey had been adopted by a loving family years before. I was not allowed to know where he was or anything about his new family.

So I was very much on my own as I lay in my hospital bed in Cleveland’s MetroHealth Medical Center after being rescued. On my own and with few resources. Yes, our rescue ignited an immediate and overwhelming public response. My hospital room was soon flooded with gifts and flowers from complete strangers, and donations to what was called the Cleveland Courage Fund were enough to create trusts that still provide financial support. I will always be grateful to all the people whose heartfelt help was so important to all of us getting back on our feet. It was the first time I ever felt that people who didn’t know me could care about me.

That realization warmed and strengthened me, but there were other realities that weren’t so pretty. I was thirty-two years old and had lost all of my twenties—probably the most robust years of any human being’s life—to Castro and captivity. My body was broken. My heart was torn apart. My mind had been challenged to its limits. I was frail and exhausted. And I was alone. I had a long way to go and a lot of healing to do if I was to build a new life after darkness.

Healing doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process that takes time and moves in stages. I had to nurse the wounds, some of them very deep, that went all the way back to my childhood. I had to treat the injuries from years of suffering, even if I couldn’t make the scars disappear. I had to soothe the pain and, in some cases, such as the pain from the loss of my son, learn to live with it.

I made my share of mistakes along the way. There were people I trusted I should not have trusted, things I did that I wish I could undo, moves I made I would like to roll back. I can’t.

But survivor’s grit teaches you how to turn mistakes into strengths. I picked myself up and kept going. And I had help along the way: legal help, financial help, and a whole team of folks helping me put together Finding Me, then helping me cope with the nuts and bolts of book tours and public appearances and the celebrity that came with it.

And then there were the well-wishers. The people who came up to me after a talk about abuse or domestic violence or missing children and thanked me. The people who stopped me in the street and gave me a hug, the people who told me I “inspired” them, the people who, to this day, shake my hand and tell me they hope I will be reunited with my son. Every good wish, every warm thought makes a difference.

SOMETHING ELSE has made a difference both in strengthening me and in helping my healing process: the growing power of abuse victims to speak up and speak out. Women especially—and never more so than in the months leading up to the publication of this book—have found their voice when it comes to every form of harassment, assault, and the misuse of power. Suddenly it seems that everywhere you look—in entertainment, business, government, politics, sports—women and girls are calling out the powerful men who demeaned them, hurt their careers, created toxic work environments, abused their trust, dishonored their bodies.

I welcome all these women and girls to the fight that I too have been waging since my rescue five years ago. I believe it is this swelling chorus of survivors’ voices that has brought about what I see as the beginning of a profound change in perception and attitude around the country and the world. The cat is now out of the bag: no one can ever again say they had no idea this was happening. The more women and girls tell their stories, the more others who have suffered abuse will hear it. The more they hear it, the more they will be encouraged to speak up on their own behalf.

As you’ll read in the pages that follow, until every victim of abuse is able to do that, I have made it my life’s work to speak out for them. Advocacy on behalf of those who suffered or may now be suffering the kinds of physical, sexual, and mental abuse that I suffered is today the inspiration of my life. Given my own escape and the life I have made for myself after the darkness, I consider it a blessing to be able to advocate while bringing hope to survivors, and I will continue to do so as long as I am able.

BUT WHAT really has powered my healing and what graces the life I have built after darkness is love. That is why this second book, Life After Darkness, is, above all, a love story. Not just because it tells how I found “my sweetie,” the love of my life and my soul’s companion. That was something I never even dreamed possible when I was rescued. But it has happened, and it has been the great happiness of my life.

At the same time this is a love story because it is about the power of love to heal suffering and pain and to transform and empower us. I mean the love my friend’s mother Rose showed me—a shining spark of light in a bleak and otherwise loveless childhood that gave me strength. The love for my son that steeled me to stay alive during eleven brutal years. The love of the true friends I eventually did find who are now such a blessing in my life—my safe circle. There is nothing better than knowing you are loved for yourself alone.

Above all, I mean the love I was able to open myself to that has magnified the love I want to give—to the son I hope to find some day, to my friends, to my husband, and to that other person deserving of love: myself. Love is what lights up my life after darkness.