By Amanda Knox
 
One of the more frustrating questions I’ve been asked as a trauma survivor is whether or not I would have done anything differently. Would I have refused to speak a word to investigators without the presence of a lawyer? Would I have acted more “normal”? Would I have stayed in Seattle rather than study abroad? These questions are frustrating because they ignore or invalidate all my growth in response to suffering.
 
National PTSD Awareness Day was June 27th, and I spent much of the week thinking about PTSD—how complex the condition, how subjective the symptoms, how paradoxical the repercussions. Then I happened to watch Season 10, Episode Six of Doctor Who, “The Girl Who Waited.”
 
For those unfamiliar with the Doctor Who series, the Doctor is an alien time traveler who has a special affection for humanity. He always travels with a human companion or two, and he is frequently rescuing Earth from all manner of terrible catastrophe across all of time and space.
 
In Season 10, the Doctor is accompanied by a young married couple, Amy and Rory. They decide to visit a holiday-destination world, Apalapucia, only to discover that the entire planet has been quarantined because of the outbreak of a lethal disease. Amy gets trapped in a medical facility designed to slow down time so that terminal patients can experience a life-time in the span of 24 hours.
 
The Doctor and Rory promise Amy that they will save her, but in the minutes it takes them to organize their rescue effort, decades pass for Amy. By the time they reach her, Amy’s a hardened old woman who long ago gave up waiting to be saved. Rory, devastated, observes, “It’s like you’re not even her.” Old Amy replies, “36 years, 3 months, 4 days of solitary confinement. This facility was built to give people the chance to live. I walked in here and I died.”
 
The Doctor promises that they can still save young Amy with old Amy’s help. But to the Doctor and Rory’s astonishment, old Amy refuses. When Rory protests, she says, “He wants to rescue past-me from thirty-six years back, which means I’ll cease to exist. Everything I’ve seen and done dissolves. Time is rewritten. I will die. And other-Amy will take my place.”
 
I understand that feeling.
 
Even though I had never posed that question to myself before, sitting on the couch watching Doctor Who, I felt a strong, painful certainty. Looking back on who I was before wrongful imprisonment feels like looking back on a little sister—I was naïve, well-meaning, and worthy of being protected against the forces that would fall upon me. But my present self did survive, I grew so much in the process. If I could, I would tell my past self that although the trauma is prolonged and painful, everything is going to eventually be OK and she is going to survive and be stronger and smarter and better for it. But, there’s the paradox: my present self would know just what to say because my past self had to struggle through that trauma scared and alone.
 
What finally convinces Old Amy to follow through with the rescue plan is when she is able to communicate with her younger self. Young Amy doesn’t plea with old Amy for her own sake, but for Rory, the man she loved who missed out on growing old with her.
 
If I could go back and somehow stop everything bad from happening—stop Rudy Guede from murdering Meredith Kercher—and thus prevent her family, Raffaele and his family, and my family from going through what they went through, then the answer is obvious. Yes, I would give up who I am now. But just for my own sake? I don’t know who I’d be without all the trauma that happened to me in Perugia, but I do know that the person I am now is worth protecting, too. I can’t say that all trauma survivors would agree, but I bet I’m not the only one who, deep down, feels this way. This is the paradox at the heart of PTSD: surviving trauma means accepting the trauma as a part of your life and learning to value the experience gained, even while never letting go of the fact that you wish you never had to suffer trauma in the first place.