All of Me Read Free Page A

life was crazy before, what would trying to fathom how this personality is fluent in two languages when I can’t speak a single word of either have done to her? It tips most people over the edge.
    Another child with communication problems is Missy, an elective mute. She and Aimee have wild times together, especially when they’re painting. But something in Missy’s life has made her too terrified to speak.
    Which brings me on to Ria. That’s the name I’ve given the frightened twelve-year-old who seems – apart from Kim – to have suffered the worst of the sexual abuse. Ria thinks her name is ‘Pratt’ because that’s what her abusers called her. It was actually on Oprah that Ria revealed for the first time the extent of her memories. It was so harrowing I could barely watch it – literally. Every time Ria came onto the screen there was a switch and it was Ria herself watching TV. It took four or five attempts before I stayed in control long enough to learn her secrets.
    Ria remembers being abused. I don’t know how many of the others do but their various ways of suffering suggest previous trauma. Judy, for instance, is bulimic. She’s convinced we’re fat even though we don’t have a spare inch anywhere on us. Then there’s anorexic Sonia, who, far from throwing up, refuses to eat anything. I can tell when she’s been at mealtimes because I’m usually starving afterwards. Abi used online dating sites to combat her loneliness, while Ken, a twenty-something gay man, is depressed by the homophobia he experiences on a daily basis.
    They all have their issues. Dawn’s suffering, however, has nothing to do with the child abuse. Perhaps that’s why it’s the one problem I identify with most. Dawn was the personality who gave birth to Aimee. She was also the one who witnessed our daughter being taken by social services. The trauma sent Dawn into hiding. By the time she returned too much time had passed and she refused to believe Aimee was her little girl. To this day she’s still searching for her baby. To Dawn it’s as real as the search for Madeleine McCann, even though Dawn knew Skye was alive.
    Then there’s Julie, whose erratic behaviour – squirting fly spray on bus travellers and trying to drive with her eyes closed, for example – contributed to our being diagnosed as schizophrenic. Together with Rebecca, they nearly got us put away for the rest of our lives.
    Rebecca started it all. Whatever her memories, she is the alter who is struggling most to deal with her past. Rebecca is the one who took the overdoses time after time. She’s the one who got us locked up in mental institution after mental institution. She’s the one who nearly ended it once and for all in a hotel room in Lewes.
    In hindsight, being diagnosed with DID and knowing about the other personalities earlier would have explained to me why I got into so much trouble at school, why my parents and teachers were always calling me a liar, and why I was kidnapped, as I saw it, by one asylum or therapy centre after another. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have thought I was being experimented on by doctors who accused me of having anorexia, bulimia and schizophrenia. And maybe I would have believed them when they said they were doing it all for my own good – to stop me trying to kill myself again.
    If I’d known the body really was doing these things, then forty years of my life would have made so much more sense.
    But, as impossible as my life seemed being hurled from one crazy situation to another, like a pinball pinged around by unknown players, it was still preferable to knowing the truth. Because to accept that my body really was doing these things would mean accepting something else.
    That it had been abused as a child.
    And obviously our brain didn’t want us to know that.
    The whole point of DID, as far as I can tell, is to protect a person from trauma. It’s a defence mechanism that kicks in to stop something unpleasant from ruining