After the Flashlight Man

One night in 1990, a stranger cut the screen out of my bedroom window while I slept and shone a flashlight into my eyes as I woke. A few weeks later, my father came down with temporary amnesia. Although unrelated, these events became linked in my mind, sweeping out from under me the fundamentals I took for granted: safety, freedom, the stability of memory, and a general oblivion to mortality. After the Flashlight Man is the story of how I came to terms with these experiences that threw my life into a whole new light: the self-defense classes, rape crisis volunteer work, writing, and meditation that served as checkpoints along my healing journey while I re-examined events from my childhood and relationships with family and friends. Ultimately, a flashlight turned against me as a bizarre weapon became instead a metaphorical tool that blazed my path, the impetus to reclaim, recast, and tell my own stories, discovering my own power to reinvent my vision of my life.