All of Me
Authors: Kim Noble
Copyright © Kim Noble 2011, 2012
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Piatkus
This edition published in 2012 by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
All rights reserved
Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
978-1-61374-470-3
Author’s note
Much of the content of this book takes place in hospitals. Where other patients are mentioned I have used pseudonyms to protect their privacy. Some other individuals’ names have also been changed but their actions are all too true.
Cover design: Rebecca Lown
Author photos: Geraint Lewis
Cover artwork: (clockwise from upper left)
The Naming
by Dawn,
Whatever
by Ken,
Lucy
by Judy,
Judy
by Judy,
I’m Just Another Personality
by Bonny
Photos of artwork: Aimee Noble
Title page and part title page artwork:
Frieze People at Night
by Bonny
Typeset in Swift by M Rules
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to our much-loved daughter Aimee, the sunshine of my life, and our wonderful therapist for her footsteps in the sand.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue:
Shattered
1 This is crazy!
2 It wasn’t me
3 Where am I now?
4 My pilot light is going out
5 There’s no helping you
6 You’re in the system now
7 Lights out!
8 What’s it got to do with me?
9 The elves and the shoemaker
10 Can you fix it?
11 I’m not one of them
12 You’ve got ink all round your mouth
13 My own place
14 The psychotic shuffle
15 It’s a crime scene now
16 Please help me
17 This is Aimee
18 Pandora’s box
19 That’s not Skye
20 Where did they all come from?
21 I am not Kim Noble
Epilogue:
Action!
Useful Resources
The Artwork in
All of Me
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jennifer Todd, Wendy Glaister, Lisa Dixon, Klare Stephens, Anna Tapsell, Campaign Against Pornography, Helena Kennedy QC, Michael Fisher, DCI Clive Driscoll, Lydia Sinclair, Dr Rob Hale, Pearl King, Valerie Sinason and the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, Professor Howard Steele, Saul Hillman, Nancy Dunlop, Ina Walker, Suzanne Haddad, Julia Harrop, Shirley Hickmott, Ami Woods, Debs McCoy, Andrew Simpson at Springfield Hospital, West Thornton Primary and Junior schools, Susan Booth, Fiona Langan and Riddlesdown Collegiate, Palma Black, Sharon Jenden-Rose, John Morton, Henry Boxer, Gillian Gordon, Beth Elliot at the Bethlem Gallery, Malcolm Wicks MP. Thanks are also due to Robert Smith for his continuous support, Jeff Hudson for taking on this difficult challenge, Anne Lawrance and Claudia Dyer for their sensitivity and understanding, the team at Piatkus/ Little, Brown Book Group, Anita and Derek, Saatchi Online for allowing separate personalities to have their own artist web pages and Outside In for accepting us as individual artists. A special thanks to Dr Laine and her husband, Andrew.
In memory of my Mum and to my Dad and his new wife, Jackie. To my sister, Lorraine, and her husband, Lol.
To my family and friends including those sadly lost along the way. To my next-door neighbour and friend, Jean, and in memory of her husband, Stan.
To my invisible friends inside, who at times are too visible!
To all those with or without DID who have emailed me about their hopes and fears.
PROLOGUE
Shattered
Kim Noble was born on 21 November 1960. She lived with her parents and sister and enjoyed an ordinary family upbringing. Her parents both worked and from a very early age Kim was left with a number of childminders – although they weren’t called that in the 1960s. Sometimes it was family, sometimes neighbours, sometimes friends. Communities stepped in to help in those days. Most were kind and loving.
Some were different.
They didn’t look after Kim Noble. They took advantage. They subjected baby Kim to painful, evil, sexual abuse. Regularly and consistently from the earliest age.
Kim Noble was helpless. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t complain. She couldn’t fight. She didn’t even know that the abuse was wrong.
But she did know it scared her. She knew it hurt.
Yet she was so small, so weak, so dependent on her abusers for so much, what could she possibly do? And then her young, infant mind found a way. If it couldn’t stop Kim’s physical pain it could do the next best thing. It could hide.
At some point before her third birthday, Kim Noble’s mind shattered, like a glass dropped onto a hard floor. Shards, splinters,
fragments, some tiny, some larger. No two pieces the same, as individual as snowflakes. Ten, twenty, a hundred, two hundred pieces where before there had been just one. And each of them a new mind, a new life to take Kim’s place in the world. To protect her. At last, Kim Noble was happy.
No one could find her now.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
This is crazy!
C
hicago, September 2010. I never imagined the day I would find myself sitting in a television studio on the other side of the Atlantic. I certainly never expected to be invited by the most powerful woman in world media, Oprah Winfrey, to appear during the final season of the planet’s leading chat show. But here I am and, as I take my seat facing Oprah’s chair, I can barely contain my nerves. The most-watched programme in America is about to be filmed and I am that episode’s star guest. And yet, as soon as Oprah sits down opposite, my inhibitions disappear.
Oprah’s studio audience is here to see her. I don’t kid myself that I’m the draw. The hundreds of people packing the auditorium reserved their tickets a year ago, months before I was even booked to appear. But the reason they love Oprah is she asks the questions that the normal American man and woman want to ask. I watch her lean in, gather her thoughts and build up to asking the Big One.
‘Do you remember what happened to you as a child?’
Three hundred people fall suddenly silent. A few sharp intakes of breath. Then nothing, as they all crane forward expectantly for my reply.
‘I remember parts of it,’ I reply. ‘Not any abuse.’
Murmurs buzz around that vast hangar of a room. Oprah looks momentarily thrown. If you watch carefully you can almost see her thinking,
I was told this woman had been abused! What’s going on?
Backstage you can imagine a huddle of researchers thrown into panic.
Oprah maintains her composure. Then, ever the professional, she rephrases the question.
My answer is the same. ‘No one did anything to me.’ But I know what she means and decide to help her out.
‘I have never been abused,’ I clarify. ‘But this body has.’
And then she understands.
Throughout our interview, Oprah referred to me as ‘Kim’. I don’t mind. I’ve grown up with people calling me that. It’s all I ever heard as a child so it soon becomes normal. ‘Kim, come here’, ‘Kim, do this’. It was just a nickname I responded to, not something to question. Why would I? I didn’t feel different. I didn’t look different. A child only notices they’re out of the ordinary when adults tell them. No one ever told me I was special in any way.
I’ve grown up accepting lots of things that seemed normal at the time. Like finding myself in classrooms I didn’t remember travelling to, or speaking to people I didn’t recognise or employed doing jobs I hadn’t applied for. Normal for me is driving to the shops and returning home with a trunk full of groceries I didn’t want. It’s opening my wardrobe and discovering clothes I hadn’t bought or taking delivery of pizzas I didn’t order. It’s finding the dishes done a second after I’d finished using the pans. It’s ending up at the door to a men’s toilet and wondering why. It’s so many, many other things on a daily basis.
Oprah found it unimaginable. I doubt she was alone. I imagine millions of viewing Americans were thinking, ‘This is crazy!’
After all, it’s not every day you meet someone who shares her body with more than twenty other people – and who still manages to be a mum to a beautiful, well-balanced teenaged daughter, and an artist with many exhibitions to her name.
To me this is normal.
In 1995 I was diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder – now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID – although it was many years until I accepted it. DID has been described as a creative way for a young child’s mind to cope with unbearable pain, where the child’s personality splinters into many parts, each as unique and independent as the original, and each capable of taking full control of the body they share. Usually there is a dominant personality – although which personality this is can change over time – and the various alter egos come and go. Some appear daily, some less regularly and some when provoked by certain physical or emotional ‘triggers’. And usually, thanks to dissociative or amnesiac barriers that prevent them learning the source of the pain which caused the DID, they all have no idea that the other personalities exist.
This, I was told, is what had happened to Kim Noble. Unable to cope any longer with the trauma of being abused at such a young age, Kim had vacated her body, the doctors said, leaving numerous alter egos to take over. I am one of those alters.