I Am a Warrior

“I am not a victim. I am not a survivor. My name is Jacks, and I get to choose who I want to be. Today, I choose to be a Warrior.”

It was January 8th, 2018, my mothers birthday, when I took the stand at Boston’s Suffolk County Courthouse, fourteen years after the day my innocence was rifled from an abduction and sexual assault. After the guilty verdict, the victims of the attack were invited to give impact statements that could influence the judge’s sentencing.

During my statement, I spoke about how I had fought to rebuild myself into a woman who chose not to be a victim. But I also realized I didn’t quite identify with the word survivor either. To be labeled as one meant that I was still embodying the other. I didn’t want to live within either of those labels. I didn’t want to be seen, judged, heard, described, stereotyped, or defined by roles that were created because of something or someone else had done to me. I didn’t want to be a textbook definition. In some way, allowing those labels to define me still gave the assailants power since choosing to be defined by these words made them the narrator of how I would continue to walk through life when surrendering to the ideologies of how others saw me. 

I didn’t want what happened to me to become the soil where I grew new roots. I didn’t want it to become the foundation from which the rest of my life sprouted. So I decided I was going to make a new label. I was going to choose who I was. I chose Warrior.

I had chosen Warrior because I finally understood that I had the autonomy and agency to decide who I was going to become. It was no longer a label created by something that happened to me. It was a name I had chosen for myself.

When I took the stand, I said the words: I was going to fight for justice for the girl whose life ended that day, the girl who essentially received a life sentence because she never got the chance to have a normal one. But I was also fighting for something larger than myself. I was fighting for women everywhere. I wanted a world where women didn’t have to worry about rape because men were taught not to, a world without restricted autonomy, economic disparity, or sexual harassment and assault, and a world where people knew the difference between the two. A world where a woman didn’t have to think about her body becoming someone else’s object of desire or a bill of sale pasted to her skin.

So I chose to be a Warrior for women, and the words, “I am a warrior,” stayed with me. They became a reminder during the many other times in my life when I felt I was doing a disservice not only to who I was, but to what I represented as a strong woman who has faced adversity. There were times when I left that ideology behind and conformed to other people’s standards because it made them more comfortable. I made myself smaller to make other people happy or approve because sometimes the fighter in me made others uncomfortable.

Later that year, my sister gave me a ring with these same words, I am a Warrior. It meant the world to me because I felt seen. I felt seen as the person who had to die a million times to become the person she was. Someone who fought. Someone who dared. Someone who broke boundaries in the boardroom, the bedroom, the bench, and eventually, the boreal.

I chose to carry that reminder with me into the Arctic, so I had the words I am a Warrior engraved into my multitool. The inscription was hidden beneath grip tape that eventually fell away through friction from grit. There was something strangely fitting about that because I fought like hell in the Arctic and found that strength again through this grit. You may not have seen all of the battles. You may not have seen all of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs, but I fought like hell out there. 

There is something about being a Warrior that I understand differently now. With every Warrior comes determination, but there is a moment when determination can become dangerous because not every battle needs to be fought. Not every battle can be won. And a Warrior does not have to win every battle to win the war. Sometimes the greater victory comes from recognizing which battles are worth fighting, which ones are costing you too much, the meaning behind the war, and when walking away protects your ability to fight another day.

I cannot fight for others if I cannot fight for myself. I cannot play the game if I am sitting injured on the bench. I cannot move forward simply because I still have gas in the tank when I can no longer see the road. Choosing not to fight does not necessarily mean you stopped fighting. Sometimes continuing the battle weakens your reserves, and weakening your army is not a decision any good general should make.

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