Tell me the weirdest place you’ve ever experienced profound validation. I guarantee you I can beat you after this week. I can say with utter confidence that this was not the experience I expected to have at jury duty the other day!

Buckle up, people, it’s going to be a bit of a wild ride.

I had to report to jury duty on Tuesday, and having never done so before, I didn’t know what it would be like, and I was nervous. I’ve generally always had a healthy level of anxiety about rule breaking, outside of some occasional mild indiscretions in my early teens. I have never wanted to be anything other than a law-abiding citizen, and so a small dose of dread and paranoia thrummed through me as I made my way to the courthouse downtown. Oh my G-d — I was in the Consequences Building! There was this sense that I had better make sure to dot my Is and cross my Ts at all times, and so I took that approach both figuratively and literally when it came to the paperwork I had to fill out once I was registered as present.

There are a couple of forms that jurors need to complete, one of which is several layers thick with carbon copies so that various parties can have simultaneous access to the information you’re sharing. Most of the questions were innocuous things like how old you are, where you live, how long you’ve lived there, who lives with you, and so forth. There are also questions where you indicate if you are related to or are close friends with anyone who works in law enforcement, the courts and affiliated offices, municipal workers, and the like. Then, the last question on this form was to check yes if you’d like to discuss anything privately with the judge. I checked yes, because of the second form I had to fill out.

This form was much shorter, no carbon copying. There were only two questions. The first one asked if a juror had ever committed a crime, been accused of a crime, or been a victim of a crime. I wrote “no” to answer that question, but I wasn’t entirely sure that was accurate, because of the second question. The second question asked if the juror had ever been victimized, assaulted, or abused, and if yes, to explain the answer. This one, I had a definitive answer to.

And y’all…

I wrote it down.

I can’t say it out loud, I’ve barely done so once or twice with my therapist; I’ve sort of written it down in a roundabout way in another blog post. But here, in the Consequences Building, for the first time, I wrote it down, plain and simple. A “yes” response, and then seven more words on the extra line on the page.

“Abusive relationship in college; abused by stepfather.”

I wrote it down.

That felt huge in the moment, but it also felt like a really bad time and place to have an emotional breakdown, so I quickly finished my paperwork and handed it in, and then returned to my seat for the next part of the morning. We watched a couple of training videos about the jury selection process and how to combat implicit bias. Then, about two dozen people were called by their juror numbers to line up and proceed upstairs to the courtroom for further interviewing. I was among those chosen (oh man, I thought, I’m going to the Consequences Room inside the Consequences Building!).

In the courtroom were the judge, the court reporter whose job it is to transcribe and record everything everybody says, the prosecuting attorney, the defense attorney, and the defendant (along with a security officer or two). We jurors all shuffled in and sat down, and were introduced by the judge to everyone else in the room and then advised what the order of operations would be in the selection process. We were to be settled into a specific seating arrangement and they made a seating chart so they could easily recognize which juror was in which seat based on our assigned numbers. Once we were settled that way, the judge advised us of the basics of the case at hand this week; more specific information would be available to the jurors who did get selected for the panel.

The case was apparently a matter of some sort of traffic violation. Color me puzzled now, after having had to anticipate this being a more violent crime thanks to the form I’d filled out earlier. Now I sat on pins and needles, wondering how it all fit together, wondering what would happen next, and worrying how to handle it without losing control of my emotions in the middle of the Consequences Building.

What followed the introduction of the case itself was a tedious process of the judge asking each of the jurors in turn about their ability to participate on a jury impartially and fairly. Then a series of questions were posed broadly about possible conflicts, biases, or contentions, and jurors had to indicate if they had any information to contribute. The judge also reviewed those supplemental questionnaires and directly spoke to any jurors who indicated any concerns on the forms there, about crimes that jurors had been involved in, one way or another. The bottom line with these inquiries was to ask if those experiences would unduly affect our ability to be fair and unbiased as jurors (this was where I had to answer honestly that yes, it could affect my ability to do the job). This was about the point where my anxiety peaked.

When he got to me and addressed me about what I wrote down, I told him that I had a question about the question itself. I started to say that I wasn’t sure if I should write down that it was a crime if that experience I specified was never pursued or prosecuted.

The words had barely left my mouth before, looking me straight in the eye, the judge firmly stated to me, “No, that is absolutely still a crime. It was a crime.”

It was a crime.

No one had really ever laid that out so plainly for me before, except maybe my therapist, and while of course her perspective has gravitas, there’s something different about hearing a judge say it was a crime. I mean, he’s the Consequences Boss in the Consequences Room in the Consequences Building; if anyone would know, it would be him!

The whole exchange was maybe fifteen seconds long, but it rocked my world sitting there in the Consequences Room in the Consequences Building. It was like I’d experienced an earthquake in the middle of a room full of strangers who didn’t feel a thing. For someone who’s had to bury that pain, that trauma, for so long; for someone who’s clawed their way through flashbacks that feel like the truth trying to violently rip its way to the light because 99 percent of the time you demand that it lay hidden and dormant in darkness; for someone who’s been holding on to these memories with no idea where to put it…

The judge essentially said, oh, I see you’re struggling to hold onto this thing? Here you go, I have a box for that, it fits perfectly.

My therapist says that in a way, those few earth shattering seconds felt like I had my day in court, confronting my abusers in ways I never could traditionally do. Indeed, later on in the jury selection process, the defense attorney asked several of us if we felt more or less like we could trust and promote the judicial process; another juror spoke about her experience with repeated criminal activity in her business that was never resolved or brought to justice. The attorney had noticed me reacting to her story, so he called me out on it and asked if I felt like my experience with being victimized would interfere with my ability to be a good juror; I explained that although I dislike the word victim, I have been victimized and then been told by law enforcement that there was no point in reporting it or pursuing justice, that no one would believe me. I told him frankly that it is difficult to have faith in a system that doesn’t hear you.

But it heard me that morning.

I wrote it down.

It was a crime.

After the exhaustive and exhausting process of interviewing the jurors, the court went into a brief recess and we were let out of the Consequences Room for a break while the attorneys and judge discussed their choices for the panel selection. Also during this time, the judge called in the few people who’d checked that last box on the carbon copy form, requesting opportunity to speak privately with him. When I was called in, he almost gently asked if I still wanted to discuss anything. I told him, and the attorneys and defendant standing around me, that I felt everything had been pretty much covered during the interviewing process. However, I was honest in explaining that I have PTSD and couldn’t know if I would be triggered by anything during the case, and would hate for that to interfere with their work in any way. They made note of this and I was told I could then take a seat because they were calling everyone else back in; the defendant then left for a bathroom break while everyone else was inside the courtroom (apparently they go to great effort to keep the jurors separate from defendants during breaks, which made total sense once that was explained!). The defendant eventually returned, the recess ended a few minutes later, and they announced the selected jurors by number. I was, thankfully, not selected and was able to leave the Consequences Building in time for a late lunch.

I wrote it down.

It was a crime.

The judge gave me a nice neat box to store that trauma in.

I was heard by the Consequences Boss in the Consequences Room at the Consequences Building. I was heard, believed, validated.

In the days that followed, I waited for the fallout of flashbacks or nightmares that I expected would come from this major reckoning. But other than the occasional mild flashback that afternoon, nothing happened. I think that’s because now the trauma doesn’t need to “hulk out” in order to be heard or seen; now, it has an actual place to sit.

All of this to say, psychological validation at jury duty is the last thing I would have put on my Summer 2024 Bingo Card, but, here we are! And really, that is of no small consequence.