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Amanda Knox posts BIZARRE 'alternate realities' where she'd been killed instead of Meredith Kercher

Amanda Knox’s experience in the prison made her appreciate life more as she tried to navigate her 'small, cruel, sad, and unfair' world

Amanda Knox, 35, posted a bizarre thread on her Twitter account on February 24 pondering over the "alternate realities" or what could have been if she were killed instead of fellow exchange student Meredith Kercher, with whom she had shared a room in Perugia, Italy. Knox, along with her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito were wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering Kercher, 21 when she and Sollecito were 20 and 23, respectively.

The acquitted convict-turned-activist Knox recently created a sensation when she started the Twitter thread talking about her "epiphany" moments while serving a sentence in an Italian prison. “After I was convicted of murder and sentenced to 26 years in prison, when the earth dropped out from beneath me, and global shame rained down on top of me, I had my first ever epiphany,” she wrote. In an intriguing fashion, she described what it feels to have an epiphany in the second tweet- “I didn’t know what an epiphany should feel like, but it was…cold. Like a clear breeze blowing in and brushing the back of your neck, making your hairs stand up.” In her Joycean third tweet, she continued, “I knew something deep down that I hadn’t known before, and I spent the next several months peering into that epiphany, trying to consider all of its implications, like watching the ripples spread out from a drop of water in a pool.”

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‘My epiphany was this…’

The young mother continued in her fourth and fifth tweets about the “limbo” she was in while trying to accept the “prison” as "my home." “My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed for my first two years of trial and imprisonment, waiting to get my life back. I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home.” Talking about the bizarre mental state, she continued, “I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer). I wasn’t. I never had been.” 

Through her sixth tweet, Knox tried to channel her struggle to accept the new unwelcome change in her life - “The conviction, the sentence, the prison cell—*this* was my life. There was no life I *should* have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me.”

Her seventh and eighth tweets focused on her coming to terms with her "sad" life - “The epiphany itself didn’t feel good or bad. It was just true. If there was a feeling, it was the feeling of fact, and it came with the next logical conclusion: my life was sad.” Bemoaning her fate, she continued, “I was imprisoned for a crime I didn’t commit. I would be locked away for the best years of my life, and deprived of opportunities many of us take for granted: falling in love, having children, pursuing a career.”

Knox wrote in her ninth tweet that she started self-pitying, “My world would be so small, trapped within concrete walls and surrounded by traumatized people, many of whom were a danger to themselves and others.”

Fearing social alienation, she wrote in her tenth tweet, “And this life would inevitably take me further and further down a path that would alienate me from everyone I loved, who, despite their best efforts to be there for me, were on their own paths moving in very different directions.”

Living in the present

Knox’s experience in the prison made her appreciate life more as she tried to navigate her "small, cruel, sad, and unfair" world and started living in "now." “The feeling of clarity, though, was in realizing that however small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was *my* life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now,” she wrote.

Her twelfth tweet, which is about her mom, read, “I was alone with my epiphany. I tried to explain it to my mom, but she couldn’t hear me. She thought I was depressed and giving up. She could not, and would not, accept that *this* was my life. She was going to save me, and she just needed me to survive until she did.”

“I told her I would, and it wasn’t a lie. I *would* survive. I knew that, deep in my bones. But I knew that precisely because I had finally accepted that I was living *my* life, whether I was eventually found innocent and freed, or not,” wrote the resilient Knox.

‘Alternate realities’

Then she started talking about alternate realities, where she said, “I allowed myself to begin to imagine alternate realities. What if I had been home that night, not Meredith, and Rudy Guede had killed me instead? What if I was acquitted and freed in five years? In ten?” She further conjectured, “What if I served my entire sentence, and came home in my late 40s, a barren, bereft woman? What if I killed myself…”

“I imagined all of those futures in vivid detail so that they no longer felt like shadows creeping over me from the realm of unconscious nightmares. And that allowed me to see my actual life for what it was, and to ask myself: How do I make *that* life worth living?”

‘How do I make *that* life worth living?’

Then she continued with the more hopeful part of her narration, “That was a big question, one I couldn't answer in its grandest sense. But there was a smaller version of that question: How can I make my life worth living *today?* I could answer that question, repeatedly.” Realizing the power of self, she wrote, “That was entirely in my power. So I did that. Doing sit ups, walking laps, writing a letter, reading a book – these things were enough to make a day worth living. I didn’t know if they were enough to make a life worth living, but I remained open and curious to the possibility.”

She then basked in the comfort of her epiphany as it no longer was a "grasping sadness," “And while my new emotional default setting remained firmly stuck on sad—I woke up sad, spent the entire day sad, and went to sleep sad—it wasn’t a desperate, grasping sadness.” “It was a sadness brimming with energy beneath the surface, because I was alive with myself and my sanity, and the freeing feeling of seeing reality clearly, however sad that reality was," she added.

Praising her "sense of balance" and embracing her "legally vindicated" identity she wrote, “I was slowly and deliberately walking a tightrope across a bottomless foggy abyss, with no clue where I was going and nothing to hold onto but my strong, instinctual sense of balance.” “In many ways, though I’m now free, legally vindicated, a woman with a career in the arts (as I’d always dreamed), an advocate for justice (which I never dreamed), a wife with a loving husband, a mother with a joyous child...I’m still walking that tightrope," she further wrote.

She ended her long narrative with a hopeful post of comfort and a smiling photo of herself while in prison. “The abyss never leaves. It’s always there. And anyone who’s stared into it, as I have, knows the strange comfort of carrying it with you.” “This is a picture of me in the prison yard in the thick of all of this. Everyone is going through something, even when they're smiling. If that sounds like you, I hope reading this helps.”

'Strength of will and resilience'

Support poured in from social media users for the sheer "resilience" and "strength of will" that Amanda showcased in the face of adversity. One user applauded, "Love you, Amanda! You do have incredible strength of Will and resilience." Another user claiming to be a representative of wrongly accused convicts lent her support by saying, "Thank you for sharing this Amanda. I represent wrongfully convicted people (in criminal and civil cases) and each of them deals with their situations differently. I will send a few of them this remarkable thread. I’m sure it will help them in some way." Another user commented, "Heartbreaking.... and yet empowering. Life is a strange thing. You do represent hope Amanda... and I'm glad you are here to share it. x."

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