Guest Blogger: Chamed, Author of My Heart Stopped Beating

Fourteen year old Italian girl, Chamed, is a living miracle after fighting illness since birth to live a normal life. Now fourteen years old, she feels a thrill of freedom when she convinces her parents to let her stay home alone while they go on holiday. She soon regrets that decision when she receives a call from her aunt Patrizia that the worst has happened: her parents have died in a car accident.

Living with My Past by Chamed

Things only get worse for Chamed as she mourns the deaths of her parents and suffers under the care of her aunt and uncle. Her aunt repeatedly abuses her and convinces others that she is an evil child. When Chamed’s best friend’s father sexually harasses her, the blame is placed on Chamed. Deeply depressed, she attempts suicide, only to find herself waking up in a mental hospital. Her nightmare is only beginning as she is subjected to electroshock therapy against her will – and worse from the nurses and doctors.

Finally she finds hope again in Dr. Franco, but will he be enough to save her from this living nightmare?

A few years ago, I was thinking to myself about the destiny of the people who were in asylums before they closed, in Italy, at the end of the Eighties.

Where are they now? I was wondering. Those asylums, which still exist in other countries or under other names, are not usually places of cure, but of segregation.

What are the problems these people must face to integrate in our world?

I am now out of the madhouses but I have to live with my past. Day after day I must face my past. In the attempt of overcoming my past, once for all, one day I decided I would read the diaries I had written as a 14-year-old girl, and I would tell my story in a book. I have published my book this year, My Heart Stopped Beating (MindLeaves, second revised edition, August 2011).

In this book I tell the story of the time when I had fallen into an inferno of torture and abuse after my parents passed away. I was abused by my stepmother, and administered electroshock. I didn’t remember anything, they obscured my mind, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t even scribble and I encountered complications in relating my ideas to my way of expressing myself, in verbal language most of all.

Then for many years, for fear, I withdrew into myself and fought with my past.

I hope my book will help other people overcome an unbearable past. I think of my book as written for an ethical purpose. If the 'moral issue' might be given more importance, you may create, day after day, in every place and corner of the earth, the words, the big and small deeds that are the conditions for a better world. A world where everyone is given the opportunity to live a more human life.

At the end of the game what remains is only the love that has been given. I thank God for giving me four wonderful parents and I would not know who to choose among all four. The first two gave me a strong base of concrete and the other two have built on this basis, which with any storm doesn’t fall down, I believe.

It certainly can be damaged, ruined, but can never fall, and without their teaching I would not be here to tell my story. So many people of the asylums had incredible stories to tell, but the lack of real care for their world silenced their word forever.

I have written my book in the most authentic and honest way for me, putting in it all my heart and all of my life and reality. I wanted to keep my story essential, going straight to the heart of the matter.

I think of my book as a message in a bottle, as my diaries were. A bottle that now, with the English edition, has crossed the ocean, and reached a public that includes many people and many countries. In most of those countries many people are still imprisoned in asylums. I wish somehow my message could reach them, adding some hope, or at least awareness.

Chamed is not the registry office name of the author, yet it is not a pseudonym. She lives in Tuscany, she works mostly abroad, as a painter on canvas and porcelain. Some of her porcelain works are displayed in exhibitions in Italy, Sweden and Poland, France, Portugal and Brazil. My Heart Stopped Beating is her first novel. A second novel by her is forthcoming.