All of Me Read Free Page B

your life. As Oprah pointed out, it’s no different from anyone pushing a dark memory to the back of their mind in order to get on with their day, whether it’s being told off by a teacher at school yesterday or splitting up with your partner. If you don’t deal with the pain or anxiety – if you can’t resolve it or stop it or forget it somehow – you’ll spend every day thinking about nothing else. Your life will be as good as over.
    Some memories are too big to bury in one mind, though, and that’s why Kim’s fractured into so many others. If she saw an abuser locally or someone who reminded her of them, or if their names were even mentioned or their memory flitted into her head, she could just vanish.
    The tragic downside, of course, is that the abuse still happened. Kim’s body was still subjected to unspeakable tortures – except other personalities were now the victims. Kim had no way of knowing, but her disappearances opened the door to the ordeals suffered by so many others. We – our therapist, Bonny, Hayley and me – know Rebecca was abused, and Ria and Diabalus and so many others. We don’t know how many times they suffered before they too found a way to hide, leaving another poor soul in control of the body. But we do know that their lives would never be the same again.
    I was lucky. I was never abused. That’s how I was allowed to grow, unlike the child personalities stuck forever at such a young age. Not only was I never a victim, I had no idea it was going on. If Kim Noble’s alters were co-conscious, like most DID sufferers, then I would know everything. We’d all know everything and we all would have seen it happen, whether we felt it or not. How would that help Kim then?
    That’s why the body makes it so hard for the personalities to ever accept we have DID. Because in order to accept it you have to come to terms with the fact that men or women have abused your body – and thought they were abusing you. It’s very plausible that I have met my body’s abusers. I don’t know who they are. I don’t want to know. But many of the other personalities do. They will never forget and they will never recover.
    From the moment I became the dominant personality I promised I would discover as much about the life – or lives – of Kim Noble as possible. After a lifetime of confusion, I needed to have the facts – however unpalatable I found them. However, trying to tell this story when, for a lot of my life, I was only around for a fraction of a day at a time has been hard.
    Fortunately I’ve had wonderful help from the one person who knows more about Kim Noble than anyone – our therapist, Dr Laine. Just as I often used to come out during sessions that Bonny or Hayley had travelled to, so the other personalities have all had numerous sessions themselves over the years. Sometimes one of them will have a genuine need to see her, or perhaps she will want to see them on the dominant personality’s behalf. (For example, if there is a concern about how a personality is behaving.) It is through therapy sessions with Dr Laine that we have learnt so much about the abuse each personality has suffered and their other trials. So she knows my story, she knows Hayley’s story, and Bonny’s, and Katie’s and Judy’s and Diabalus’s and so on and so on. You’ll see scenes from some of their lives at the start of each chapter.
    Of course, I’m well aware that if Bonny were still the dominant personality then this book could read very differently. The same is true of Hayley – and I hate to think what would be written by Judy, Ken, Rebecca or any of the others. We all have such different memories; we’ve all experienced so many different things.
    For my own part, I admit, for a long while the tempting thing to do would have been to give up when the whole world seemed to be conspiring against me with lies, brutality and incarceration. I wouldn’t have been the first personality to fade away and I