Overcoming Anger Through Street Art: A Sexual Assault Survivor’s Story
An artist known as ‘Miss Me’ has used artful vandalism to reclaim female power — and in the process, her own life.
Before it happened, Miss Me had been living a “normal life,” she says. Everything fit: her job, her friends, her understanding of the world and herself.
But then she was raped, and suddenly that life did not make much sense anymore.
Miss Me spent months living at her parents, trying to work through the trauma. Notions of time evaded her. “It was a sort of strange trance,” she says. “It took time and determination to get back on course; to eat, socialize, go back to work.”
She knew she couldn’t return to the life she had before, even though it had once made her happy. So she quit her job at an advertising company and took up something she never thought she would: art.
“I’d made a list [of things I wanted to do], because I was scared to end up with nothing and to get confused, and on this list, [art] was at the bottom. It said, ‘paint and draw again,’” she says. “It’s the only thing I’ve done since.”
She’d taken up drawing again after her assault, but the art was private, confined to her personal notebooks. After…
