My Lost Toddlerhood

I bought myself a Rode microphone with a pop filter. One of the best on the market. I built myself a recording booth in the conservatory. I up‑ended an old table, lined it with towels to absorb echoes, clipped a camping torch inside, and printed my scripts in large type. With a mixer and sound‑editing software, I had created my own little recording studio. I had ventured into the world of audiobooks. And the learning curve was steeper than Mount Everest. My recording studio in 2015. (Image taken from my book Mirror Image Shattered ). My Split Identity Speaks Through My Audiobooks Knowing nothing about sound recording, I had to learn from scratch. Faulty equipment, buzzing wires, mysterious hums, and endless mishaps meant three months passed before I recorded a single syllable. Eventually, I began with short stories to practise vocal technique before tackling my so called ‘novels’. My book, Mirror Image Shattered explains. At first, the project thrilled me. I anticipated every session....

I self‑published my second novel, The Locked Door . The year was 2008, the early days of self-publishing. My novel climbed the charts, up and up. There it climbed into the realms of the big names, like Cole and Patterson. I couldn’t believe it. A character born from my secret world was out there. Readers from around the world were downloading his story. I continued to teach part‑time, did the school run, and pushed a trolley around the supermarket. But inside, my exhilaration lit me up. Every sale brought a surge of excitement that shielded me from my difficult past and the dour present. No one knew about my novel except my twin, Eve. And even with her, I sometimes closed up. Key scene in my second novel, The Locked Door . A captive peeks through a hole in the floorboards. Author with a Fractured Identity With The Locked Door out there, I decided to retrieve my first novel, The Lessons from the attic. I tore open the old brown envelope to find a mediocre manuscript. How could this nov...

After my divorce, I moved house and dragged with me a padded brown envelope. It contained my abandoned novel, The Lessons . Throughout my adolescence, it ate me up inside. My intrusive thoughts drove the plot. A disfigured man, a derelict house and a psychopath. I stuffed the thing into the loft, where it lay untouched for fifteen years. During that time, I ‘moved on’. The following account is taken from my book, Mirror Image Shattered . I worked twelve years in an office, raised my children (with a new partner after two years of being single), and proved to myself that I could be a decent parent after all. The fear of becoming an ‘ogre parent’ like Dad had almost cost my motherhood, but slowly I learned I could give my children the stability I craved. My Past Follows Me Around My sibling and I rarely spoke of our difficult childhood. We talked about our kids, our jobs, the good times — not the years of living with a mentally ill dad. I still believed in the red herring: that my intrus...

People often told me I should have been a model. My identical twin even had a brief modelling stint and appeared in the local paper. I had fair, angular features, blue eyes from Dad, an early growth spurt that made me tall against other schoolgirls. But inside, I felt ugly. Disfigured and unfeminine. Adolescence came like a spotlight shining on me and all I wanted to do was hide in the dark. I didn’t want anyone looking at me. My mirror image seemed to hide an inner disfigurement. Analysis taken from my book The Lessons My book Mirror Image Shattered explains, my diaries from college describe ‘terrible shyness,’ times where I froze for an hour at Christmas parties, terrified boys would detect the black, ugly thing I drag around. I feared people would see this other self in my eyes. I feared they would find me uneasy to be around. She’s a bit ‘weird’, ‘eerie’. She doesn’t say much. What’s wrong with her? I envied carefree girls who revel in being themselves and joke around with other b...

I graduated from City Polytechnic with an upper‑second in 1986. I almost failed due to my dire dissertation. I returned home, signed on the dole, and became housebound. The cottage was ablaze with rows, Dad was unwell again, and months of painting for a local exhibition left me exhausted. Something inside me snapped. The catalyst was a slighting remark over my life plans, but the real cause had been building up for years. My book, Mirror Image Shattered explains: " That night, when I went to bed, I shivered. Not with cold, but fear. I pulled the covers over myself and felt my personality disintegrate. A black void surged like a vortex in my head, dragging me to childhood: intrusive thoughts, terror of the dark, the feeling of being consumed by something nameless ". I spurned the characters of my stories that had lived inside me for years. My secret novel I had toiled over for months on end felt laughable, stupid. My degree felt worthless. I imagined myself; a pathetic sad‑c...

I do not hear voices. I do not hallucinate. I do not act under imagined forces. Every consultation I’ve had has confirmed the same. I am not schizophrenic, bipolar, nor suffering from a neurological condition. I am rational, grounded, independent, and capable of living a normal life. And yet, something inside me was… wrong . My inner world grew stronger than my outer one. It felt fuelled by another self — a person I felt ashamed to claim as my own. I told myself he was nothing but a fantasy, an imaginary character like any child might invent. A childhood familiar. He was a man. And he would shape decades of my life. Birth of a Shadow Identity The earliest version of this man was grotesque. I imagined him with acromegaly — overgrown bones, pockmarks, a bleak scowl, a stutter, learning difficulties. He lived in a dead‑end town, misunderstood and doomed. I didn’t know where these horrible notions came from. They felt objectionable, intrusive, and familiar. My plotlines consist of tortured...

For as long as I can remember, something set me apart from other people. I became the oddball. Teachers wrote in my school reports that I “seemed to lead an intense inner life.” I often drifted out of conversations, losing minutes. Words dissolved before I could grasp their meaning. People repeated themselves. I pretended to follow along so I wouldn’t look stupid. It wasn’t shyness. It was a kind of dissociation that made ordinary interaction feel like wading through fog. My split self goes back to my toddlerhood. My book Mirror Image Shattered tells the whole story. My Aural Dyslexia No One Could See I seemed to suffer a form of dyslexia, but in listening — an aural processing disorder. Music lyrics slipped past me. Spoken words tangled up. I asked Mum for a hearing test, convinced my hearing had gone awry. She whispered, “Would you like some sweets?” I answered instantly “Yes please!”. She smiled and assured me there was nothing wrong with my hearing. Okay, so my hearing was fine. ...

No relationship compares to that of identical twins. I often felt sorry for ‘singles’. How lonely they must feel. I sensed a private wavelength only two identical minds can detect. Eve and I often didn’t need words. We understood each other’s moods, fears, and ideas— a mirrored experience. Life as a Mirror Image Twin But twinhood is not the magical telepathy as portrayed in films. We never ‘heard’ each other’s voices in our heads. Instead, our parallel wiring and shared childhood meant we made similar connections to things. Our closeness was real but grounded by living side‑by‑side. Despite what others saw, I always felt different from Eve. That was her name - Eve. I was the driving force — the one inventing games and solving problems. I was the tomboy interested in meteorology and science in jeans and T-shirts. Eve crocheted, macraméd, and read agony‑aunt columns. She embraced growing up and boyfriends; I clung to childhood. She was my counterpoint, my resilience, and my life‑raft. Wi...

In August 1981 (when I had turned sixteen), my writing turned a dark and sinister corner. Until then, my stories had been innocent children’s mysteries, rooted in fantasy landscapes. But now, a door in my brain is creaking open. A nasty man began crawling into my head. I would call ‘John’. John was tall, disfigured, scary and knew vile things. He would fuel my first serious novel. I had originally called it The Upstairs Room . Later, I called it The Lessons . My shift into darkness has now begun. My childhood storytelling is clashing with a deep and black past. My book analysing my novel, The Lessons The Evolution of The Upstairs Room The following is taken from my diaries. On 30 August 1981, my twin Eve and I were sitting in the garden with Donna Jenkins, (a wheelchair‑bound girl who lived nearby). The sun cast long shadows across the lawn, and Nan had come to visit. It should have been an ordinary, carefree afternoon. Instead, Donna told us she thought she was pregnant — and then rev...

In the autumn of 2016, shortly before Mum died, I had a disagreement with one of her carers. It was over a minor thing, but confrontation has always triggered a nasty feeling inside. I privately call black‑blame — a crushing, weeks‑long sensation of guilt, shame and degradation. Even when I’m in the right, I feel wrong, I feel responsible. For years I assumed this was simply part of being human, but one day I realised this wasn’t normal at all. None of my siblings felt like this. Not even my identical twin, Eve. My book, Mirror Image Shattered explains. Black‑blame has shaped my life. It drove me into art, writing, record‑keeping, research, blogging — anything to keep myself occupied. It was like trying to sit on a pin: constant discomfort, constant diversion. I often wished for an off‑switch. Sometimes I wished I could be anyone but me. I grew up believing childhood must be the source. But the more I compared my experiences with those of my siblings, the more I understood that someth...