That’s So Moxie
How a Survivor's Voice Became Her Superpower in a Broken System
Someone told me recently that I have moxie.
We need more of it, she said.
I'd heard the word before, but I looked it up anyway. Because apparently, surviving life doesn't automatically earn you a vocabulary degree.
Moxie means guts. Nerve. Courage. The willingness to stand your ground when standing down would be considerably easier - and considerably more comfortable for everyone else in the room.
Cheers to that.
It also turns out the word began as a patent medicine.
In 1876, a man in Massachusetts started selling something called Moxie Nerve Food, marketed to people who had lost their nerve and wanted it back.
Eventually, it became a soft drink.
A famously, aggressively bitter one.
Most people apparently spit out the first sip.
The ones who don't tend to drink it for life.
That seems about right.
People sometimes ask me how I do it.
How I walk into a space and say the things I do without watering down the message. I've learned how to soften the delivery without softening the truth, choosing language that makes hard things easier to hear without making them any less true.
There's usually an assumption tucked inside the question: that I must be fearless. Or oblivious. Or perhaps I simply don't realize how uncomfortable I'm making everyone.
Oh, I realize.
I understand exactly how uncomfortable I make others at times.
I've just learned that discomfort isn't necessarily a reason to leave the room.
How?
The honest answer is life credentials.
Not a degree. Not a certification.
The kind of education that comes from protecting your children through circumstances you would not wish upon your worst enemy - and then refusing to check out afterward.
Staying engaged.
Asking a lot of questions. Researching.
Learning the system from the inside while living inside what the system was supposedly built to address.
Where the Credentials Came From
In 2017, I was launched into my first court case.
It was not a light one.
It was one of the deepest forms of trauma a family can go through, and it had happened inside mine. I did not see it coming.
I was in shock.
Not the figure-of-speech kind. Actual shock. The kind that required medical attention.
I couldn't calibrate. Days went by that I don't have clean access to.
At one hearing, I remember I was sobbing uncontrollably.
Not quietly crying in the back row. Sobbing.
In a courthouse.
In front of people whose job it was to make decisions about my children and our life.
My brother put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me.
"Lauren, you have two choices. You lay down and die, or you get up and you fight. What are you going to do?"
I felt about a bajillion things in that moment.
And then, underneath all of it, something went quiet.
Not calm.
Just quiet enough to have a moment of clarity.
I did have choices.
They were mine.
I had rights.
I didn't know what they were yet, but I was going to find out.
My children, they deserved justice.
So, I chose to fight.
Not hastily. With curiosity.
That distinction changed everything.
What the Rooms Have Wrong
Here is what I've learned about the rooms I have the opportunity to speak in:
Most of the people in them are not hostile.
Most are good at their jobs. Most genuinely want to help.
But many of the people working within these systems have a deep misunderstanding of the cycle of abuse.
Not maliciously wrong.
Tidily wrong.
The model makes sense on paper. It fits neatly on a slide.
Tension builds.
An incident occurs.
An apology follows.
Calm returns.
The cycle begins again.
Clean.
Teachable.
It is not, however, what happens inside a home and inside a life.
Real life is considerably messier. And often, the most important part happens after everyone thinks the incident is over.
So, when I speak, I'm not necessarily bringing an opinion someone could reasonably disagree with.
I'm bringing something that wasn't on the table.
Lived experience.
And something interesting happens when you do that.
People get curious.
Questions start. Then more questions.
And once the questions begin, things come forward that nobody has said out loud yet.
The door opens.
The Prosecutor from Boston
A while back, I was invited to a meeting with prosecutors from around the country.
At one point, one of them asked whether I could identify ways a district attorney had gotten things wrong or misrepresented them.
I candidly asked the prosecutor from Boston if he was prepared for my answer.
He nodded, hesitantly.
I told him that, in my experience, it is not helpful to tell a family that has just survived abuse to go home and take care of themselves because the case is now in someone else's hands.
When I was told that, I didn't do it.
I stayed involved.
I needed to understand what was happening to my children, because understanding it was part of how I was going to help them heal.
So, I went to every court hearing.
I scheduled meetings.
I brought specific questions written down.
And then I would watch my question get danced around for about forty-five minutes.
Forty-five. Nearly every meeting. Like clockwork.
A truly impressive amount of choreography.
Every time, I'd thank them for the information.
Then I'd say:
Now, back to my question. Will you please answer it?
I don't necessarily think they were hiding anything.
I think they didn't want to upset me.
I think they were trying to be careful with me.
What they missed though, was that the worst had already happened.
I didn't need to be protected from the answers.
I needed honesty. I needed transparency.
That particular kind of gentleness that treats a victim as fragile can become its own quiet way of telling someone they don't belong in the room.
Survivors feel that.
I've heard the same thing from many others.
It can feel defeating.
And worse, it pushes people away from the very process they most need to understand.
I leaned in instead.
Because the case file in their hands also happened to be our life.
If the system has become so complicated that the only people who understand it are the people running it - and everyone else is told to go home and trust them - then something has gone disturbingly sideways.
What They Told Me Next
Something shifted in that room.
They, too, leaned in. And then they told me something I've thought about ever since:
They receive training on how to deflect hard questions, so families don't get upset.
Not how to answer difficult questions carefully.
How to steer around them.
So I informed them those trainings are wrong.
Because what they actually do is sever trust and create more confusion.
The people sitting across from them did not arrive there because they had a bad afternoon.
Something catastrophic happened in their lives.
They are people, too, I reminded them. Of course they are - just in a very different place in life, often on the worst stretch of it.
Diminishing that person doesn't spare them anything.
It compounds what they're already carrying.
Someone once told me the judicial system is nothing more than a second victimization.
I've found that to be largely true. I just refuse to sit with it.
So, I've made this my work.
First, and above everything else, to support victims and survivors.
That is the priority. Nothing displaces it.
Second, to bring what I've learned from real life experiences back to the systems that are getting it wrong.
The more survivors I speak with, the more information I gather. The more information I gather, the clearer the message becomes.
There are voids.
Some are obvious. Some are hiding in plain sight.
Some may be unknown to the very people who need to know they exist.
So, I shine a light on them.
Because how are they supposed to improve if no one tells them?
I've also learned something important about doing this work:
Information moves a room.
Emotion may get you through the door, but information changes what happens once you're inside.
I have plenty of emotion. Believe me. I've been the conductor of the Hot Mess Express more than a few times.
But it hasn't been particularly conducive to the work.
What moves a room is a clear account of what happened, delivered by someone who was there, who took notes, who paid attention, who asked questions, and who can tell you what is actually happening - not simply what everyone assumes is happening.
I will not wrap my words in cotton-candy clouds for your comfort. I've said some version of that at times when I've been told I'm a little too direct. Sometimes I can practically feel the top of my head being patted as if someone is thinking, Pipe down, little lady.
Here's the thing: I'm very petite. Almost 5'2".
Being a small woman somehow gives people an unspoken permission slip to treat me like a child.
And I learned early that if I walk into a room with too much softness, people don't necessarily hear me as compassionate. They hear me as uncertain. They talk over me. They explain things I already know. They mistake kindness for a lack of competence and conviction.
So I learned to be strategic.
That doesn't mean I stopped caring. Quite the opposite. It means I learned that if I want people to hear the message, I have to deliver it in a way they can actually receive.
I don't soften the truth. I soften the landing, most of the time.
There's a difference between making a message palatable and making it powerless. I'm interested in the first. Never the second.
If I open with concise, impactful statements, suddenly I have their attention. And once I have their attention, I can share the rest.
The Light
Somewhere along the way, I also learned dark humor.
Not by choice, exactly. It became necessary.
There are absurdities inside cycles of abuse and inside the systems built to respond to them.
And if you can't laugh at at least some of them, you will eventually be swallowed by all of them.
Dark humor has been somewhat of a lifesaver for me.
Not because it makes the darkness disappear.
Because it keeps me from getting lost inside it.
It's a light.
It doesn't make the room less dark.
It just means you can see where you are.
A small example: for a while, I was trespassed from my daughters' school district.
Not arrested. Not charged. Trespassed.
By written notice.
For going to the school after my daughter was pulled out of class without the notification the principal had previously agreed to provide.
It lasted months. It covered her senior year.
At some point, it also became theater.
So I bought a shirt.
Novelty graphic.
Morel mushrooms across the front.
I trespass because I have no morels.
The situation was not funny.
My daughter was standing in the middle of it.
But if they were determined to stage the whole production, I was going to enjoy the costume.
There is an expectation that people thrown into this space must be permanently solemn.
The subject is heavy, so the advocate must be heavy.
Grave voice. Grave face. No jokes.
I understand where that expectation comes from.
I've also watched what it does to people.
It burns them out.
They go in with everything they have. They carry it all with the appropriate gravity.
And eventually, they can't anymore.
They leave.
And the gap they were standing in is empty again.
Moxie has a wink in it.
That's not a defect in the word.
That's the part that makes it survivable.
Finding something to enjoy in this work isn't disrespect toward the material.
It's what allows you to still be doing it a decade later.
Still learning. Still sharing. Still showing up.
I didn't come to this easily.
For a long time, none of it was anything but heavy.
But somewhere along the way, I discovered that naming a gap accurately can be satisfying - even when the gap is horrifying.
Watching a room full of professionals lean in because you finally said the true thing out loud?
That feels good.
The Nuisance
A district attorney once told me his office had spent more time with me than with any other victim or victim's family on record.
He told me I had become a nuisance.
I told him I understood he meant that as a criticism, and that I was going to receive it as a compliment.
Because if every family had the capacity to stay engaged - to keep asking questions, to keep learning, to refuse to be talked out of the room - his office would have a very different job.
One that required him to actually be a District Attorney, rather than simply hold the title.
Prosecuting crimes.
Protecting a community.
Not simply offering a good plea and closing the file.
Case after case.
I then asked him a question he refused to answer, so I reframed it.
He was visibly irritated and still refused to answer.
Instead, he told me that if I wanted the answer, I would need to submit a public records request.
I pulled out my pen and notebook.
Excellent. We were getting somewhere.
If he wasn't going to answer the question I asked, I was going to ask enough questions to get to the answer I needed.
I asked him what the process was. He explained it.
And that was all I needed.
For him, it meant 72 case files - the number of Jessica's Law cases his office had handled since he became DA.
I learned a lot.
Enough, as it turned out, to help end his political career.
Sometimes moxie looks like speaking up.
Sometimes it looks like knowing exactly what to ask next.
Bring It
So, moxie. It really is, so chic.
It's an old word for nerve, born from a bitter drink, and I'll take it.
But I'd amend the definition slightly.
The dictionaries tend to describe moxie as a character trait. Something you either have or you don't. I think they've got that part wrong. Moxie can be earned.
Mine came from life credentials.
From protecting my children through things I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and then refusing to check out afterward.
From staying engaged.
Learning the system.
Asking which law, exactly.
Going home and looking it up.
Asking another question.
Then another.
Anyone can get these credentials.
Most people would rather not.
But if life has handed you an education you never applied for, you have something the rooms need.
Bring it.
Bring your questions.
Bring your experience.
Bring your curiosity.
Bring the perspective nobody thought to ask for.
Bring the inconvenient observation.
Bring the thing that doesn't fit neatly on the slide.
And, when appropriate, wear the graphic shirt.
Because the goal isn't to become the loudest person in the room.
It isn't to win every argument.
It isn't to make everyone comfortable.
The goal is to stay curious enough to keep asking the question that matters.
And brave enough to keep asking when nobody answers it.
To the people inside the system:
Your training is not the whole education.
When someone walks in with life credentials, get curious.
Not everyone is built to bring them.
So when someone does, don't manage them out of the room.
Listen.
There may be something you need to learn.
And to survivors:
You do not have to sit down and be quiet.
It's your life.
Your voice isn't a courtesy someone extends to you when they have time.
Your questions aren't an inconvenience.
Your experience isn't an interruption to the process.
You are part of the process.
This isn't a classroom. We are not the students.
Life lessons, maybe.
But we get to engage.
We get to ask.
We get to learn.
We get to challenge.
We get to bring what we know.
And maybe that's what moxie really is.
Not fearlessness.
Not anger.
Not being difficult for the sake of being difficult.
Maybe it's simply deciding that your voice belongs at the table - and having enough nerve to pull up a chair.
So, if life has handed you an education you never asked for, I'm sorry.
But don't underestimate what you learned there.
Bring it.
The rooms need it.
The systems need it.
The next person coming through the door may need it.
And if somebody tells you that you're a nuisance?
Smile.
You might just be doing it right.
That's so moxie.
