Reviving Ophelia Read Online Free PDF

searched for a way to begin.
    Finally Cayenne asked, “Do shrinks analyze dreams?”
    “Do you have one?”
    Cayenne told me of a recurring dream in which she was asleep in her upstairs bedroom. She heard footsteps on the stairs and knew who was coming. She listened, terrified, as the steps grew louder. An old man leading a goat walked into her room. He had a long, sharp knife. Cayenne lay in her bed unable to move while he began slicing at her toes. He sliced off pieces of her and fed her to the goat. She usually awoke when he reached her knees. She’d be covered with sweat and her heart would be racing wildly. Afterward she was afraid to go back to sleep for fear the man would return.
    When she finished I asked her what she thought the dream meant. She said, “It means I’m afraid of being cut up and eaten alive.”
    Over the next few months Cayenne talked in fragments, almost in code. Sometimes she talked so softly that I couldn’t hear her. She wasn’t happy in junior high and missed her old school. She missed her sister, Marla, who was away at college. Although she was sure it was they, not she, who had changed, Cayenne missed the closeness she had had with her parents.
    Cayenne’s demeanor was cautious and her speech elliptical, but she kept coming. She hated her looks. She thought her hair was too bright, her hips and thighs too flabby. She tried to lose weight but couldn’t. She dyed her hair, but it turned a weird purple color and dried out. She felt almost every girl was prettier. She said, “Let’s face it, I’m a dog.”
    She didn’t feel comfortable around her old friends. We talked about the girls in her class who teased her about her clothes and about the boys who gave her a hard time. Cayenne had problems with most of her friends. Everything was unpredictable. One week she felt reasonably comfortable and accepted, the next she felt like a pariah. She told her friends secrets only to have them spread all over the school. She was included one day in a clique and left out the next. Some days guys called her a slut, other days these same boys would flirt with her.
    She felt pressure to use drugs and alcohol. She said, “I was the perfect angel in grade school. I never planned to smoke or drink, but all of a sudden, alcohol was everywhere. Even the president of the Just Say No Club got loaded all the time.”
    School, which had once been fun, was now a torment. She felt stupid in her math and science classes and bored in everything else. She said to me, “School’s just the way the government baby-sits kids my age.”
    We talked about her parents’ rules, which had grown much stricter after the herpes. Her protests were surprisingly weak. She felt ambivalent about her parents—part of her felt guilty about all the fights with them, while another part blamed them for not understanding the pressure she was under and keeping her safe.
    I recommended she write down three things every day that she felt proud of. I asked her to write me a letter telling me her good qualities. She wrote that she was proud of mowing the lawn, doing dishes and going to church with her grandmother. As for good qualities, she liked her navel and her feet. When I pressed her for personality characteristics, she liked her courage and directness. At least, she could remember being that way.
    One session, dressed in sweats and red-nosed from a bad cold, Cayenne told me that Chelsea was afraid she was pregnant. She had missed a period and showed positive on a home testing kit. We had a general discussion of girls getting pregnant, teenage mothers, abortion and birth control pills. Cayenne was happy to discuss her friend’s sexual behavior, but volunteered nothing about her own.
    The next session she said that Chelsea was not pregnant and had renounced sex until she was sixteen. She and Chelsea had gone to the movies to celebrate. We talked about Mermaids, the movie they had seen, in which a teenage girl has graphic sex with a guy