It started like a journal entry.
Or a prayer.
Or a protest.
I’m still not sure.
All I know is that one night, I sat down, opened a blank page, and wrote a letter.
To the person who assaulted me.
I was not ready to forgive them. I still am not. But I needed to speak, even if they never hear it.
I remember the way my hand trembled as I wrote, my heart pounding like I was back in that room. It felt like it was happening all over again.
“You may never read this, and that’s fine. This is not for you. It is for me.”
It was the first time I admitted, honestly, fully, and on paper, how much had been taken from me.
Not just my health.
Not just my job.
But my sense of safety.
My ability to walk into a patient’s room without bracing myself.
My right to feel human in a place where I had once offered humanity to others.
I kept writing. And as the words spilled out, I realized I was not writing just one letter, I was writing many.
- To the system, for normalizing violence and turning its back on us.
- To the culture of silence, for punishing those who dare to speak.
Each letter peeled back a new layer.
Each one was hurt in its own way.
But each one also ignited something inside me, anger, yes, but also clarity.
This was never about revenge.
It was about acknowledgment, reflection, and truth.
I needed the world to understand that what happened was not just “part of the job.”
That a nurse being assaulted is not an occupational hazard to shrug at.
That reporting it is not “overreacting.”
It is a matter of survival.
And I needed to hear that truth myself.
“You broke something in me.
But I am healing.
You do not get the last word. I do.”
These letters became my armor, not to protect me from the past, but to help me walk into the future without shame.
They gave me the voice I was denied in that brief ER visit.
They returned the power stolen from me in that night’s chaos.
Most of all, they reminded me that I was not alone.
Whenever I shared a letter, anonymously, quietly, or boldly, I heard echoes in return:
“I felt that too.”
“That happened to me.”
“Thank you for saying what I could not.”
Maybe that’s how we begin to heal, not by staying silent, but by writing the letters we should never have had to write… and sharing them anyway.
Because the act of speaking is an act of rebellion.
And in this broken system, our truth is a revolution.
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