As someone who also experienced a major trauma in my teenage years I have occasionally wondered about this too. I suppose I’m mildly fascinated as to how someone with all her privilege and opportunity can fail to achieve anything at all. I know people who have pulled themselves up from nothing, proper bootstraps myth stuff. I’ve done okay in context too, I’ve achieved meaningful things that I can die happy knowing I’ve done. But Jack has had it all on a plate and done nothing. She sometimes seems to have progressed no further than leaving school in terms of her emotional development. And that was something I also went through for a while until my early twenties - sort of arrested emotional development whilst simultaneously progressing fine in terms of going to work and that - because of unaddressed trauma. So I have wondered.
Objectively I had far far less resource available to me in terms of ability to get medical support, having supportive family, knowledgeable family (none of my family were clinical workers or even clinical adjacent!), my own and family’s social capital, financial resource. Anything you can think of, I had less than she did. So I had to do lots of learning and growth by myself, including getting psychology books out of the library and renewing them till they wouldn’t let me renew them any more (the internet wasn’t as well populated then as now!). Lots of feeling uncomfortable, in pain, and crying a lot on my own as I processed what had happened years before. Being triggered, as in the real meaning of the word, by casual references on TV of the sort of thing that had been done to me. (Luckily my friends weren’t cunts so they never joked about that anyway, though some people did and that would trigger me too.) I tucked myself away for a while and got on with life while my emotional scar tissue thickened. Eventually booked in to talk to a GP who referred me for some therapy, which wasn’t long enough at all but was better than no support. And here I am. Not a liar, not a fraud, not a grifter taking hundreds of thousands of pounds from people, not avoiding tax.
And I think it was tit that I went through all that, and I’m not using it as an example of personal resilience, because I don’t think anyone should ever have no choice but to deal with that alone. It’s not right and everything should be different. I’ve had to have some more therapy every so often since, usually when serious life events have wrecked me. It’s never enough, really, but that’s because I can’t afford enough. (NHS provision is really poor.)
Even if she did experience terrible things - and we have no way of knowing, she may not have - it’s in no way an excuse for being as awful and hideous to people as she is now. Profiting off people’s naivety, perpetuating harmful stereotypes about disorders she claims to have, causing worry and upset to followers with the suicide baiting, humiliating her son. Millions of people have disorders arising from trauma but they don’t treat other people they way she does. Millions of people have less access to help, they don’t have well off parents and wealthy partners who can pay for therapy like she has and had. Millions of people only hurt themselves, they don’t cause harm to other people from their massive social media platforms, they don’t steal and cheat money out of people. So. No excuses for her anyway.