Living a Double Life: How Childhood Trauma Fragmented My Identity
At the age of 14, I began to draw a man’s face. The man had broad features, shaggy dark hair and a fierce glower. I didn’t know where he came from. Before long, I was compulsively drawing this man in the margins of sketchbooks and puzzlers. When I was bored or when life seemed to hold little meaning, I would draw him. I disliked and feared him yet I sensed he needed something from me. As no one of that description lived with us, I assumed he was a fictional character.
Aidan who was never a childhood familiar. My book The Lessons analyses my novel.
The Drawings That Haunted My Adolescence
Before long, something psychologically dangerous happened.I imagined living his life and I put myself in his shoes. I injected part of myself behind his face. As a result, my feelings for this man grew conflicting. My dislike for him remained but now I felt guilty and responsible for him. I even cared about him. This is because I had placed my humanity behind the face of a man who was in fact callous. The resultant concoction of emotions is extremely unsettling.
This man became a constant companion in my head. I called him Aidan and I reasoned he was a childhood familiar. Before long, I had Aidan’s life story, which seemed to come from nowhere.
Living a Double Life Inside My Head
Aidan is an obnoxious misfit who lives in a stuffy house full of high achievers. He suffers dyslexia that causes shame within his ‘perfect’ household. Worse, Aidan belongs to a criminal gang headed by a psychopath that operates in a derelict house.
A female counterpart is needed to ‘save’ Aidan from a wretched life full of torment. Her name is Laura, a young English teacher who had believed her student to be a schoolchild needing a little brushing-up on literacy. But she is shocked to encounter a loutish thug.
What I hadn’t realised was that both Aidan and Laura are two parts of me. Aidan is abused and trapped in a vile situation; Laura is the part of me I believed I was: un-abused and ‘free.’
My Parasitical Novel Takes Over my Life
With locations crystal-clear in my mind, I drew maps and sketches, including a railway track and woods that backed onto the derelict house where Aidan frequents. In response, my fantasy world intensified and grew clearer.When I turned 18, I made the momentous decision to put it all in a novel. My first draft was called The Upstairs Room before I called it The Lessons. This novel has been published but I have changed the title and used a different pseudonym for this research book in order to retain my anonymity.
My book The Lessons analyses my life whilst writing about Aidan. Diary excerpts and illustrations show an oppressive force living in my head.
The Horrific Truth Behind the Fiction
I toiled over The Lessons for 3 decades with the belief I had never been abused whatsoever.
When I was 51, I discovered that my mother’s half-brother had lived in the cottage with us for over a year when I was a toddler. The year was 1968 and I was 3.
To this point, I believed he had stayed only briefly and had little to do with us.
When I was 51, I discovered that my mother’s half-brother had lived in the cottage with us for over a year when I was a toddler. The year was 1968 and I was 3.
To this point, I believed he had stayed only briefly and had little to do with us.
An early draft of my novel The Lessons
The Fantasy World That Grew Into a Novel
A complex series of events caused my unearthing of horrific memories of being overcome on my bed. Other memories followed suit, including childhood robbed in the guestroom as well as other locations of my childhood home.
This terrible realization has thrown my life into turmoil.
Horribly, Aidan possessed the name of my uncle: Dan. Uncle Dan. Nan or Dad would naturally have addressed him ‘Hey, Dan’ or something like that. To my toddler ears, I would have simply heard ‘Aidan.’
Ultimately, I will never know how many times Uncle Dan did that despicable thing. Such an uncertainty is difficult to live with.
A Man I Thought was Fiction
The man that I had drawn in the margins of sketchbooks when I was 14 had in fact taken my childhood away. He was not a childhood familiar at all. Worse, The Lessons novel cast further clues to the darkness of my toddlerhood. However, these clues are hidden behind the guise of an apparent psychological thriller about a teacher trying to set free her criminal student. The nastiness of the novel is not crime nor drug abuse, but about loss of innocence.Related Articles on this Blog
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Themes in my workFor external sources related to this topic, visit my Further Reading page
About me
Start here How I learned the truth about my past in 10 parts
Buy my books from Amazon or browse the Madeleine Watson Book Catalogue on this blog.
Themes in my work
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