The Manual: How to deal with incest, rape, paedophilia, abortion, drug addiction, dysfunctional relationships, depression and suicide.

There are no sirens, no screaming, nor yelling. Somehow a 38 year old’s foolproof suicide attempt failed. Somehow a 36 year old’s dysfunctional relationship of four years and the drug addiction that came with it is all over. Somehow an 18 year old mother’s newborn child survived a difficult birth and microsurgery. Somehow a 16 year old’s parents failed to notice their daughter’s abortion. Somehow a 13 year old thought it was normal to have a sexual relationship with a man six years her senior. Somehow an incestuous paedophile, who abused his granddaughter between the ages of 9 and 11, lives with himself somewhere in Bendigo.

There are birds chattering and the faint noise of passing cars, like waves gently making their way into shore. Somehow Debbie Jennings, 39, sits before me outside her East Geelong home. She looks like she could be any hairdresser; jeans, a simple black jumper, eye liner, mascara and shoulder length hair. “Sitting here talking to you, I’m amazed I’m here, I’m amazed I want to be here.” We are sitting on a couple of old chairs in the gravel of her car port, surrounded by an assortment of furniture and a shopping trolley. Inside, her vivid artwork adorns the walls of her modest unit.

SUICIDE

Her hair was abnormally short when I first met her in early 2008. Debbie had just survived a suicide attempt which her doctor could only describe as a miracle. “There was no medical explanation as to why I had survived,” she explains.

In the couple of years leading up to her suicide attempt, Debbie was forced to face her demons after a life time of suppressing them. At the age of 36, her destructive relationship of four years came to an end and she acknowledged that she had become a drug addict. At the same age, she finally told her family about the abuse she had suffered as a child at the hands of her grandfather, which they refused to believe at the time.

“It’s probably the hardest time, is being off the drugs, these two years. You band aid things with drugs.” “Coming off the drugs ... everything’s raw, everything comes back, and that’s when all the traumas come back, because nothing is shielding them.” “You actually have to face (them), and that’s when the grandfather thing came back, the flash backs came back, the nightmares started, my world crashed, my family crashed.”

She speaks calmly and pauses for thought every so often. Seldom did she pause to wipe her eyes; she did this in much the same way she would pause to light a cigarette.

“All I want is to have a normal brain, to live untraumatised, to have a normal train of thought, which I’ll never have completely, but just to wake up and to want to get up, to wake up and to want to live.” “It seems probably so simple to some people, but it was such a hurdle to me, it was just something I’d never think I could grab. That’s why you go to suicide, because it’s just too hard, it’s too hard to deal with.”

GROWTH

After accepting her fight to continue to live, Debbie started the “enormous disgusting task” of untangling the crossed wires in her head.

Her artwork didn’t always grace every room inside her unit. “My psychologist made me realise something. I never used to sleep in my bedroom, I always used to sleep, even (last year), on the couch. I put it together when I was talking to her and I said, ‘that bedroom was another world.’” “And I said to the psychologist, ‘why is that?’ The bedroom was the naughty room, it was the dirty room, and naughty things happened in there. When I put it together, throughout my whole life my bedroom has been messy, and when I accepted what the psychologist said I cleaned up my room and I slept in it ever since.” “It was very hard to clean up but I knew I was getting better. I could do it when I wanted and I could do it myself.”

“Moving on, it’s easy to say but to do, it’s very difficult. It was like a full time job,” so much so that she has been writing a book about her life. There is so much more to her story, but like the working title of her book suggests, she is ‘Just a Girl.’

“I’m no hero for surviving it, you just have to.” “It’s not a choice.” “You can live without your eyesight, without your hearing, but not without your mind.”

SERENITY

“Now I’m serene at everything, and when I became serene, everyone came back wanting redemption.” “When I started to heal was when I let go of any revengeful thoughts, anger.” “There’s no point, it’s been done. It’s about me healing from it. No one else can heal me; a judge can’t heal me, money can’t heal me, compensation can’t heal me.” “Karma comes back around. They have to live with that for the rest of their lives; they know what they’ve done.” “You just leave it to their own conscience, and that’s a beautiful karma.”

It is only through this healing process that Debbie has been able to make sense of her life. “I thought I’ve been put here for a reason and I’m starting to see what it is. It’s helping people live through trauma.” “There is no bloody manual, hopefully my book is the manual, and that’s why I wrote it, because I would have loved to have read something like that.”

“No-one can fix your own brain but yourself.” “The moment I loved myself is the moment everything started going right.” “It sounds really clichéd.”

Skip to the end: Nothing to do with Malaysia at all really, a profile of one of my neighbours from when I lived in Geelong last year.