Forgotten Girl

by Naomi Jacobs

  It was from a mental health worker to a psychotherapist and was about Adult Naomi.

  Dear Catherine,

  Thank you for your referral of this woman, who presented with symptoms of low mood and low self-esteem related to a history of abuse. I met her on three occasions during October and November to make an initial assessment, the outcome of which was to put her name on our waiting list for individual psychotherapy.

  Ms Jacobs is an intelligent and highly motivated woman, who has many strengths and is functioning well in many areas of her life. However, her self-esteem is very fragile, as is her sense of ‘self’ in general, and at times of severe stress she has experienced a degree of fragmentation of her personality. This is particularly frightening for her because of a history of psychosis and mental illness in her family.

  However, her difficulties can also be seen as a consequence of adverse early experiences which have damaged her self-esteem and affected her ability to manage internal distress. Hence Ms Jacobs can feel completely overwhelmed by powerful emotions, which can feel chaotic and frightening. She also experiences physical pain which seems to be connected to internal psychological states.

  I am hopeful Ms Jacobs will be able to explore her difficulties within a safe therapeutic relationship with the aim of developing further her capacity to manage and contain distress without recourse to use cannabis, drugs or excessive painkillers. She is aware that therapy may increase her symptoms of anxiety and depression and that it will be important to discuss this with her therapist so that they, along with Ms Jacobs, can monitor the balance of risks-benefits of therapy. Ms Jacobs feels the risk of suicide is very low, as she is aware of the impact this would have on her son, and in recent months she has found adaptive ways of managing distress such as seeking help from her sister and/or the Samaritans.

  Should you have any queries about my assessment or the proposed treatment, please do not hesitate to contact me.

  With best wishes

  Yours sincerely

  Ms S. Libbert

  I put the letter back into the diary and placed it on the shelf next to me.

  Stopping my brain from even thinking about what I had just read, I got out of bed, ran a bath, climbed into it, washed my body, dried myself, and dressed in the Miami Vice velour tracksuit I’d turned my nose up at weeks ago. Then I went downstairs and had just made myself a cup of peppermint tea when the phone rang.

  ‘Hiya, hun.’ It was Simone.

  ‘Hi,’ I said quietly.

  ‘What’s up, Nay?’ She knew instantly that something was wrong.

  ‘Simone . . .’ I took a deep breath and then burst into tears. ‘What the hell happened to me?’

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  It all came out in one big unpunctuated stream. ‘The diaries the stories being depressed feeling suicidal being bipolar. I mean, what the . . . ? And the cocaine and smoking weed and Mum and her alcoholic lies and losing my home my business. Why? And then the friends and the arguments and the flashbacks.’ I sobbed. ‘Low self-esteem no sense of self what the hell is fragmentation of personality and abuse? Abuse? What abuse?’

  ‘Nay.’

  ‘And then psychotherapy and needing help and not having anyone to help me and . . . STRESS! BLOODY STRESS AGAIN!’

  ‘Nay—’

  ‘And the flashbacks? Flashbacks to what?’

  ‘Nay, listen to me—’

  ‘Flashbacks to what?’ I bawled.

  ‘NAOMI JACOBS!’ Simone shouted this time.

  I stopped talking but the tears carried on, silently.

  ‘Listen, babe, just take a deep breath and calm down. Nay, breathe.’

  I did and exhaled into a quiet sob.

  ‘Listen, hun, I’m coming up in about an hour. I was calling to say I’ll go shopping, cook a Sunday roast for us all and I’ll stay over.’ She spoke softly.

  ‘Okay,’ I whispered.

  ‘Nay, this is all the past. It’s history, remember. I know it’s not to you. I know it feels like the future, but it’s not. This has already happened and you’re reading about it, but it doesn’t have to affect you now in a bad way, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ I didn’t understand. I was affected by what I had read, affected in a big way.

  ‘What I mean is, babe, it’s your choice. It’s your choice how you deal with this. If it’s too much, stop. It’s that simple; put down the diaries and stop reading. You’ve done a lot this weekend; give yourself a break. You don’t need to know everything right now, okay?’

  I thought about what Katie had said, about hospital, but after what I had just read, I had images of men in white coats, large needles, and padded rooms.

  No way, Jose. Leo. I had a child to take care of. I needed to pull it together.

  ‘No, I’m okay.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right; it’s just all a bit overwhelming. I’m gonna step away from the diaries.’ I faked a laugh. ‘Is Leo okay?’

  ‘Oh, he’s great, Nay. We’ve had a laugh today. He’s been making papier mâché masks with his mates. He’s made one for you.’

  Thoughts of Leo being happy quelled the flow of tears.

  ‘Nay, please remember that no matter what has happened, you have done a bloody fantastic job with him. You should be so proud, ’cause you’ve raised a beautiful, smart and funny boy, and he’s a credit to you, do you hear me?’

  ‘Y . . . Y . . . Yes,’ I stuttered.

  ‘No, I mean it. Don’t you ever forget that,’ she insisted.

  ‘Okay, thanks, Sim.’

  ‘Right, we’ll be up in a bit, and give the diaries a rest, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  And I meant it. I felt right there and then that despite what I had read in the diaries about the arguments we had had over the years and the not speaking for months, that when the universe was handing out sisters, I had been at the front of the queue and had struck gold. But true to form, I ignored her pleas to put the diaries down and went straight back upstairs. I had a feeling I was close to understanding why I was here.

  It took me an hour and a half to flick through the other diaries and search through the boxes of letters and printed emails Adult Naomi had stashed under her bed. I was gathering the centre-pieces of the puzzle. A picture was beginning to form. And then I found some pieces of paper; they were pages ripped out of her 2002 diary.

  8 April 2002

  I’ve been told that if I write it down, how it’s affected my life, then maybe it will somehow help. So here goes.

  I am still affected by it in many ways; the fact that I can’t remember exactly what happened pains me. It comes in dribs and drabs. A memory here, a flashback there. It makes me feel stupid at times and leads me to seriously doubt myself. I know I have a low sense of self-worth. I find it hard to maintain my self-esteem and confidence. It never feels real. Like it’s mine. It’s like it doesn’t belong to me.

  I still have feelings of dirtiness; I have since I was a child, like no matter what I do I could never get clean. It’s not as bad as it used to be, though. Maybe it’s getting better the more I remember.

  I go through periods of hating myself with a passion, and although most times I don’t even realize it, I have a low opinion of myself. I do not believe I deserve success or can achieve my goals. My depression isn’t that bad right now, but I still smoke weed when I panic and feel out of control of the things in my life. I think my life is blessed, but I cut off when I do something good; when people praise me I do not believe them, that it’s really me doing it. I am not able to enjoy feeling good and find it hard to trust my intuition, to trust myself and others. I constantly strive for perfection but often don’t finish the things I start, which makes me feel like a failure. My feelings scare me sometimes because I don’t understand them. I don’t understand where they come from. I feel very attached and then very detached. I can think violent thoug
hts and get so angry with myself. I have felt suicidal many times; even now I still get very confused at times and panic about making decisions.

  I turned over the page.

  My mum is an alcoholic and I buy her drink when she visits. I know I do this for her approval, so that I feel like she’ll love me just a little bit more. So that she can see I understand her.

  My sister still lives with me, and I know we need to come apart because we rely on each other too much but I don’t want her to leave. What would happen to me if she did? What would happen to Leo? Am I enough of a mother and father for him?

  I feel very cut off from people and the world at times. I go out and dance because I need to feel something, feel that I’m sexy, because I have never been happy with my body or the way it looks. I feel like my body has betrayed me, it has let me down.

  I still think I am a bad person and I don’t deserve the love I am shown. I get anxious and tense if a person sits too close to me, touches me, etc. I usually at some point before, during or after sex quietly panic and hold my breath.

  I smoke weed when I am sad or in pain and have always had this unexplainable pain in my body that I know comes from my mind. Because it starts, always starts, with a thought. I think this is in some way connected to the abuse. None of my relationships last long and I don’t think I make any real friends because I don’t share who I am with people.

  I found another ripped page.

  I sleep sometimes when I am coping. I know I am coping because I sleep; dreaming helps me to cope. But it doesn’t happen very often. I don’t think I have had a proper night’s sleep for twenty years.

  I try and cope by immersing myself in my son’s world, becoming a child again, playing with him, wrestling, tickling him, making him laugh, reading stories to him, painting, building things with him, watching his favourite films with him. Making up stories where he is always the hero – he loves this. We play football together, even in the rain; we put our wellies on and go out and splash in the puddles and play Pooh sticks.

  We bake cakes and then eat them until we are stuffed.

  I cope by giving myself the childhood I wanted. By being the mother I always needed.

  The way Adult Naomi felt about herself majorly wigged me out for a moment there; so much negative stuff. But in a weird way, I kind of got it. If she was in pain, I understood why she didn’t feel good about herself. It also began to explain why three years later, in 2005, she began to lose it. I mean, having to deal with everybody else’s crap as well as feeling like she did. No wonder she couldn’t cope. I still didn’t get the drugs thing, but if she didn’t rate herself highly, then maybe that’s all she felt like she deserved in her life. If you can’t feel good, how do you know what good is? Still, she found ways to cope sometimes, which was a good thing, right?

  But what happened to her? I turned the page. And what I read flipped everything in my fifteen-year-old world upside down.

  You . . .

  You abused my trust and stole my innocence. You stole a part of me which I now struggle to get back every day of my life. I hate you. I hate the abuse I now inflict on myself because of you. I am alone and I have to deal with this on my own and I’m scared. Scared of going to bed early, scared of being on my own, scared of other people’s thoughts of me, scared of myself. I have buried all of this pain for far too long. It feels like it’s fucked me up in ways I can’t describe and I feel like you have won. Sometimes I get one over on you, sometimes I feel like I am winning and I can never go back to that place you put me, but then I find myself there and realize you’ve won again. I hate you. I don’t care who hurt you or abused you. You had no right to do it to me; you had no right to touch me in places that belonged to me. Why did you rape me? I didn’t do anything wrong to you. All of that hate and anger pushed onto me, forced into me, and then you told me not to cry. That it was my fault, that I was a dirty little bitch. HOW DARE YOU!

  There’s no health here; there’s no health in my mind, in my body, in my heart. You took my health and I want it back, it’s not yours; it wasn’t yours to take and yet something made you think it was. I blamed myself; I thought it was me, that I did it all. But I know now it wasn’t. It was you.

  It was you . . .

  You!

  NO . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . no

  I searched through the box again; this couldn’t be true.

  Stole my innocence?

  NO.

  What happened to her?

  . . . touch me in places that belonged to me.

  NO!

  Not her, not me, not this!

  . . . forced into me, and then you told me not to cry.

  NO!

  I picked up the box and threw it against the wall. The rest of the papers flew out.

  NO! I slumped against the wall and let out a loud scream. ‘NO!’

  The only words going around my head: It wasn’t yours to take.

  A cold darkness seemed to cover my body and wrap its icy hands around me. I couldn’t breathe. I grabbed at my chest, gasping for air. Sobs caught in my throat and I desperately tried to push them out, but my body seemed to be fighting the pain, wanting to push it down, push it further inside.

  I lay on the floor amongst the papers and diaries and curled into a ball. It reminded me of all those weeks ago when I first woke up in the future and had lain on the bathroom floor thinking I was stuck, trapped like a caterpillar in the chrysalis of an intricately spun nightmare. Caught in a bad, wicked, terrible dream that I had no control over. This was ten times worse.

  I cried until I had no choice but to give in to the pain; it found its way out. All of the fear, frustration and furiousness flooded out of me, drowning me, drowning the mental images of the diary pages, into one bottomless pit of waste matter.

  Is this why I am here? Is this what I woke up in the future to find out, that I was abused as a child?

  NO! It can’t be; this can’t be happening. Adult Naomi . . .

  I needed Adult Naomi.

  I sat up, my face soaked with tears, my body drenched in sweat, and picked up my hand to wipe my face. A page was stuck to it. It was then that I saw three more pages sticking out from under the bed. It had Adult Naomi’s writing on it. Feeling too weak to sit upright, I leaned against the wall and read the papers.

  16 September 2005

  I’m sat in the car outside the school waiting for Callie to get here with the keys. It’s raining. I’m early, the first one here. I felt like writing, but I don’t have my journal, so am using the back of one of my worksheets to write this. Have been sat here thinking about everything I have been through this summer. The therapy with Ben, he teaching me to see my mind as a house, to help me find the hidden parts. The parts I buried so deep, so long ago. He did say it may get worse before it gets better. Boy, I didn’t realize how much worse it could get. Although once you open Pandora’s Box, it’s near impossible to close it. But when Leo was born I made a promise to myself that I would heal whatever pain was inside of me, that I would give him a better life than I’ve had. To heal whatever wounds needed healing, no matter how bad they were. It took me four years to pluck up the courage but I did it. It’s the reason why I started this therapy: to remember.

  I wanted to know. I needed to know. And well, now I do. The flashback last month on the stairs confirmed it. It makes sense now, why I have never liked wearing pink. I was wearing a pink dress when the sexual assault happened.

  I’ve been thinking about trust while sat here. About how trusting children are, how trusting I was. He wasn’t a family member or even a friend. But he was the brother of a friend and he was trusted. Was it because he was married and a member of the church? Didn’t anybody suspect him? Those days were different then; parents never suspected if they left their children with people that they would come to harm, and certainly not sexual. But I did; he harmed me, assaulted me, and I saw how deeply and painfully he did during that flashback. So painfully that I saw my mind actually splitting
when he raped me all those years ago and the sheer force of that memory made me fall down the stairs, and by the time I reached the bottom I was six years old again. How does that happen? I left my body, my adult body, and six-year-old me came back from the past and had full control. I could see what was happening to me as I floated above. But I couldn’t get back into my body

  I haven’t told anyone, not even Ben. I just don’t understand how this could happen to me, how I could leave my body like that. I am just grateful it didn’t last that long, and that it was the photo of Leo on the wall that pulled me back into my body, brought the adult me back into the present. But now she’s here, the little girl in the pink dress, six-year-old me, with me, inside of me, inside the house; she calls it the ‘boo boo’ what he did to her, to me, and she needs healing. I need healing. Maybe this is why my relationship with Eve and her drinking has always felt so chaotic and abusive, because of what I went through as a small child. How did I survive it? I was only six. But I get it now, it just makes sense; I get why I’ve always hated the colour pink – I associate it with vulnerability. I understand the drugs, the weed-smoking, the depression. The flashback was horrible – it was like going through it all over again – but if I hadn’t have had it, well, I wouldn’t understand right now. So much is starting to make sense.

  I also remembered something the other day when I was with Callie; we were talking about when we were kids and our favourite books. I was thinking about Jonathan Livingston Seagull and how profoundly it had affected me, and then I thought about how it kind of saved me really. I remember being ten years of age and trusting again, and again that trust being violated twice by another ‘friend’ of the family. Someone completely different but someone who again thought they had the right to abuse my trust and cross the adult-child boundary. The shame and disgust I felt when he kissed me, forcing his tongue into my mouth, made me turn inwards and to books and to food. But it was that book that told me there was something in life to look forward to. That one day I would get away and live my life, really live, soaring high above like Jonathan, and I would be free. Am I free now? Has remembering all of this freed me? I don’t feel free. There’s too much pain to feel free. Maybe one day I will.