Before anyone picked up a pen, they stood here. The trifold named what so many carry without words — the power and control wheel, the cycle of abuse, the difference between a survivor and someone still inside it. Crisis lines and local resources were available for anyone who needed to take something home.
Belief Statement
Survivors are everywhere. They sit next to you in class, pass you in the hallway, hold the door open at the grocery store. They don’t always look like what you imagine. They don’t always know yet what they are.
This project began with a simple belief: every survivor is strong, resilient, and worthy. Worth being heard. Worth taking up space. Worth the words it takes to tell their truth.
What we did
In April 2026, DMACC Honors students brought Stories of Survivors & Words of Encouragement to campus, a project designed to do two things at once: inform our community about domestic abuse, and create a space where survivors could speak, anonymously and freely, and be answered.
We set out a trifold display covering the realities of domestic violence: its forms, its statistics, its resources. We provided crisis lines, local shelters, and counseling options. And then we asked people to write.
Some wrote their stories. Some wrote encouragement. Some did both.
What came back was a chorus.
The Cards: Words of Encouragement and Personal Stories
The cards you’ll see below are recreated from the originals to protect the privacy of everyone who wrote. The words are theirs. The courage is theirs.
They are displayed here exactly as they were meant to be, stories followed by the hands that reached back to pull others back up.
The Invitation
There is a reason the pen has always threatened power. Dictators and authoritarians throughout history have silenced writers and artists first because a person who can name what was done to them cannot be entirely controlled. To write is to refuse erasure. It is the quiet insistence that your life happened, that it mattered, that you were here.
Writing has always been an act of freedom. When we write, we claim our own story. No one can take that back.
This is why we write. This is how we heal. Not just as therapy, but as resistance. As the radical act of saying this happened, I survived it, and I will not pretend otherwise.
If these cards move you, if you have a story of your own, if you have words of encouragement for someone still in the dark, we want to hear from you. Visit our submission page and tell us what you’re healing from. What you’re fighting for.
You don’t have to be ready. You just have to begin.
