Paris by Paris Hilton

Author:Paris Hilton [Hilton, Paris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Part 3

I’m a girl from a good family who was very well brought up.

One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian.

BRIGITTE BARDOT

13

The year 1998 was basically a giant hole in my life—no music, no TV, no clue about pivotal changes in communication and technology or anything else going on in the world. In January 1999, I was released from Provo Canyon School, and Britney Spears dropped her debut album, . . . Baby One More Time. I couldn’t get enough. The rebellious energy. The new way of mixing and editing music. She wears the music like a catsuit on that album. I was instantly dying to know: How did they do that? The shift in technology maybe wasn’t so noticeable for some people, but I’d been music deprived for most of the past two years.

The video for the title track on . . . Baby One More Time starts out with Britney sitting in class, flicking her pencil and bouncing her foot as the agonized seconds click by. Then the bell rings. She’s free.

That was so me.

That impatient schoolgirl dying to be free. And then she is. And she transforms and becomes herself. I loved the idea that a girl could own her sensual self like that and just enjoy it without shame or fear. But then there’s that line that keeps repeating: My loneliness is killing me. Because a girl who doesn’t conform, a girl who’s disobedient and bold, a girl who shows her strength and sexuality—that girl is on her own, no matter how many boys dangle from her charm bracelet.

For two years, I was starved for music, for art, for food—everything that makes life beautiful or even bearable—but mostly I was starving for love. From the night I climbed out the window to kiss the pedophile, I had felt cut off from my family. That was the most brutal part of everything I’d been through. It wasn’t the physical miles that separated us; it was layer upon layer of shame, lies, and denial.

To be a good “graduate” you were supposed to say that CEDU and Provo saved your life. They programmed us to believe that if you talked shit about the school, the school would talk worse shit about you—to your family, to potential employers, and in my case, to the tabloids. It was a powerful muzzle. Most survivors—including me—just wanted to get on with our lives and never think about those places ever again.

I recently asked another survivor, “How did you cope with things that first year after Provo?” and she said, “I drank until I was blind.”

Self-medication is common among survivors. So is self-harm. It makes total sense. It takes a lot of effort to fake it in a world you no longer recognize, and advanced imaging shows that childhood trauma affects the brain: the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center where addiction clicks in; the prefrontal cortex, where impulse control happens—or doesn’t happen; the amygdala, where fear lives.

Nicky was the bright-yellow pool noodle who kept me from drowning during my first few months of freedom.

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