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 As an adult was parentally abducted as a child who changed names and locations almost as often as I changed clothes, I have often asked myself the question: "who am I?" And I am not talking about the deep, existential questions about the meaning of life that most people struggle with. I struggle with the question in the simplest sense. For example, I have struggled with figuring out which of my given or assumed names to use. After my abduction, my father renamed me to avoid detection. My given name is Cecilie Rina. But Sarah is the name I have used for most of my life. Which do I use? How do I answer when I am asked where I come from? I have lived in so many places. what religion do I practice? which holidays I celebrate? and so on. Aside from the deep sense of fragmentation and pain that being a child caught in the middle has caused, I have had to grapple with questions about the basics of self-definition. And there were no easy answers. I cringed when I was asked these seemingly simple questions. It is in the past few years that I have come to a clearer understanding of my past, how it has shaped me, and how it defines me today. I was not going to throw it all away or pretend it had no influence on me. That would just have caused greater pain and an ever deeper sense of loss and fragmentation. All of me is precious and worth keeping. I have had to allow myself to find out what the essence of me is-- what I want for myself, who I am, and without shame, without guilt, without regret or feeling torn apart by loyalty conflics. I needed first and foremost to be true to myself. The core questions about identity and self-definition were so difficult in part because my fear was that no matter what I chose, I would lose out, disappoint someone, let go of a precious part of myself, and always feel a sense of fragmentation and disconnection inside. I feared that in the choosing, I would have to give up some aspect, some part of me that made up me. As those parts felt so disparate, so difficult to integrate with one other, I despaired of ever feeling a real sense of wholeness, of calm with all these seemingly opposing pieces of myself. It has taken some time, but I am finally finding the real me in the midst of all the many identities that I have had to take on as an abducted child, and the pain of feeling disconnected, not completely part of anything, is slowly beginning to recede as I emerge out of the chaos of the past. I began with my name. The first, my birth name, is Cecilie (pronounced Sess-eel-yeh) Rina. Until my abduction at age four, I was called Sissi or Sisselina, in the sweet custom of nicknaming a young child. After the abduction my father changed my name to Sarah, the first of many aliases, and for all intents and purposes, my birth name was no more. I never used it, although I knew it was my "other name" (I refused to consider it my "real name," as I had totally taken on my new identity and felt completely disconnected from the little girl that was Cecilie). During the years on the run my identity would change again and again, once to a boy (I was dressed up as a boy and had my hair shaved), and took upon myself the identity of a pre-teen boy (and the challenge of choosing whether to use the women's room or the men's room. When I chose the women's once, I got yelled at by indignant women). Then it was Leah, Sarah Leah, and then Zissel (which sounds a little like Cecilie, perhaps my father's way of allowing some of my old self to exist and be acknowledged). At some point my last name changed, too. At times it was Nash, which, no offense with any one with the name, I hated. "Me" became a fluid being, changing all the time. We told a different story in each new place we traveled through during the years on the run. In Philadelphia we said we were from New York, in New York we were from Montreal, in Montreal we were from Detroit, and so it went. It was scary to be asked my name or where I was from, because it was hard to remember who I told what to. Not only my name was changed. When I was 7 my father decided to change my blond hair color to red. He tried to put the dye in while I took a bath. It got into my eyes and I screamed. He had to stop. I cried not because I did not like the color red, but because it hurt my heart and soul. I had lost so much, and losing my hair color was more than I could bear. Since Sarah is the name I am most accustomed to, it has become a part of me. It is only recently that I have made the decision to continue using the name. Cecilie feels like a part of me, but not like all of me. It is too difficult of a life change to completely remove the part of me that Sarah symbolizes by never using the name again. It is what I answered to for so many years, and the name most of my childhood friends and acquaintances know me by. I agonized over this for a long time, as it felt wrong, like a continuation of the untruthfulness of the abduction, to use Sarah. Yet it is a part of me, and so integral that the pain of completely letting go of it was too high of a price to pay. It was not my fault that my name was changed, and it would essentially have been renaming myself, which would have been an additional trauma and painful emotional issue to add to the long list of emotional baggage that the abduction had caused. My mother did not insist on calling me Cecilie when we met, and understood that I was more comfortable with Sarah. I know it was difficult for her, but she did it for me, for which I am grateful. I struggled with not wanting to give my father the satisfaction of knowing that I still used Sarah, because I did not want him to feel that I condoned the abduction or accepted it in any way. But I have come to realize that I do not want to take the time and energy to have to prove anything to him or anyone else at my own expense. I AM Sarah, and that is okay. It is not my fault that I was abducted, and Sarah is a part of me, just like other things that I learned and experienced along the way that are also parts of me. I came to realize that I did not have to sacrifice anything of myself for anyone, and could peacefully live my own truth. Of course I do not condone the abduction, but I can accept the reality of what happened and integrate it into my life in a realistic and positive way. My father knows very well that I do not like what he has done, the hurt he has caused. If my using Sarah is a source of some kind of satisfaction, it is immature and shortsighted, and is not something I will waste time agonizing over. I have not completely given away my birth name, and do also use Cecilie today. I often use both, and I'm happy with my two names today. I give myself the freedom to use both. My mother sweetly says that a `dear child has many names." It gets confusing for others though - recently two people who know me met for the first time, one that knows me only as Sarah and the other as just Cecilie, and I had to laugh when each called me a different name to the confusion of the other. At a gathering of formerly abducted children who are now adults, we joked that we each needed multiple name tags because we had so many names. Today, I am making peace with both Sarah and Cecilie. They have merged into one whole, and have formed the person who has become me. It has been difficult at times to be what has felt like two different people. I have had to deal with confusion and fear - who am I, who was I supposed to be, who would I have been if I had not been abducted, and would I like that person if I could magically become her now? Do the people in my life accept and love the person I have become, the person my experiences have shaped me into? These are very painful issues, and I have struggled with them over the years. As I grew and developed into adulthood, I came to learn more about myself - my interests, my beliefs, my passions, my politics, my goals, and many key elements of my personality, and have come to accept that they are what make up me, my identity as a person. I am growing to accept and embrace all that is me, and stop feeling that I need to be someone I am not. It was not my choice to be an abducted child, but the reality is that I was, and it has shaped me as a person, and I am proud of the person I have become. I am a whole person, even if I am not fully American, fully Norwegian, fully Sarah, or fully Cecilie, and this has caused confusion and pain to myself and others. But I am the person I was meant to be, and am fully able to love all of the people in my life, no matter what my name is. I am a whole person, entitled to enjoy the parts of my past that are meaningful to me, hold the beliefs that I have without guilt, speak the languages I speak without shame, and develop into the person I was meant to be, embrace that which feels true and real. But I am ,first and foremost, simply who I am. All the parts make up a whole. None of them are all of me, all of them are a part of me. They are all a part of my frame of reference, my past and my future. But none of them define me fully, and I can give myself the freedom to be myself! | Checklist | | Co-founder Ceci Sarah´s story | E-mail Form | A Welcoming Word from co-founder Linnea | Min Baby -- Svenska | | Return Home | For Parents | The Kids Link-history | THE LINK Newsletter | A Therapist´s Tale | Great Links | Advice for parents & kids | A Custody Battle: Blogged | |
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