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It’s a memory so painful that for many years afterwards, I blocked it out. I was in Year 7 at an all-girls school in Oxford, and I was being bullied, so badly I dreaded walking through the doors every morning. On this particular day, my mum had come to collect me, but she couldn’t find me despite frantically searching for over an hour.

She had no idea I was locked in a nearby phonebox, crying tears of utter humiliation. A group of girls had pushed me in there and used a stick to hold the doors closed from the outside. Their taunts of ‘Saddam’ – a reference to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein – rang in my ears.

I am a manifesting expert, and I passionately believe in its power to transform our lives and enable us to create the lives we want. I’m so proud of the success manifesting has helped me to achieve and the self-worth it has helped me to build. But there were very difficult times in my past that, even now, I’m always working hard to process and let go of.

I’ve spoken openly about the struggles with drugs I had in my twenties before manifesting put me on my current path, but what I’ve never talked about until now is what came before, during my childhood – and how it cast a shadow over my sense of identity until I hated every aspect of who I was and where I was from.

Now, I’ve written another book about manifesting, this time for children aged eight and above, to give them the tools and guidance to help them learn how to be the best and happiest versions of themselves. Writing Manifest for Kids, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on my own experiences at that age, and how different the trajectory of my life could have been if I’d known back then even a fraction of what I do now.

I was born in Saudi Arabia, the youngest of four siblings, but my Iraqi parents had to leave very suddenly when I was six months old. We moved to Oxford, one of the most quintessentially English places in the country, and for the entire family, it was a serious culture shock.

Growing up, I always felt different to everyone else. With my dark skin, hair and eyes, I looked nothing like the popular girls, who were blonde and blue-eyed. My home life was completely different, too. My family were devout Muslims who prayed five times a day and ate only Arabic food; my mother wore a headscarf. We didn’t celebrate Christmas, or even eat lunch – I remember being fascinated by the fact other children sat down for a meal with their parents in the middle of the day. From the start, I felt a strong sense of ‘otherness’.

I never particularly enjoyed school, but after 9/11, it became unbearable. Suddenly, Muslims were seen as the enemy, and Islamophobia flourished. Iraqis, in particular, were treated with great suspicion: in the run-up to the Iraq war Saddam Hussein was said to be hiding Al Qaeda and planning attacks on the West.

I began secondary school in 2002, the year after 9/11, and I was immediately singled out by the other girls as a target. I had no real friends and no sense of belonging. When two older girls started being nice to me, I was so excited and grateful that I became obsessed with them, but then they’d turn on me. It was my first experience of a toxic relationship.

I’d completely forgotten the incident with the phonebox until my mum reminded me of it. School felt like an unsafe place to me, but the truth is, I didn’t feel any more comforted by going home to my family or culture – instead, I started to reject them. I felt embarrassed when my mum came to collect me wearing her headscarf. I wanted to live in the same way that everyone around me did; to blend in and be anonymous.

At 12, I changed my name from Rawan to Roxie because I thought it sounded more British and would help me fit in. Looking back, I can see it was a total rejection of who I was. When I met people, I would lie and tell people I was from Jordan rather than Iraq. I didn’t want to go on holiday because I knew my skin would get darker in the sun, and I already hated my olive skin. In fact, I’d started to see myself as hideously ugly and to loathe myself.

Meanwhile, after the war started in 2003, my mum would be in tears because her beautiful country was being destroyed. She and my dad would be on the phone to family who was hiding under the stairs because they were being bombed. So, I was torn between feeling offended at the way Iraq was being portrayed and wanting to turn my back on it entirely.

I changed schools after the bullying became out of control, but even at my new school, I remember someone calling my mum a ‘Paki’ because they saw her headscarf. And by that point, the damage to my self-esteem had already been done. From then on, the self-loathing was always there, waiting to take different forms throughout my life.

When I developed curves, I wanted to get rid of them and developed an eating disorder. I had zero self-worth. I felt like a loser who nobody liked, and I’d overcompensate with friends, doing everything I possibly could to keep hold of them. Then, at 18, I discovered drugs. A line of coke gave me an ounce of confidence, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing.’ But, of course, drugs just made everything a million times worse.

By May 2018, I was at rock bottom. I went on a two-day bender, woke up and thought, ‘There’s no hope for me.’ But then I heard a podcast about manifestation – the practice of turning your dreams into reality via visualisation, affirmation and action - and it felt like a lightbulb moment. People sometimes think manifesting is just about picturing something and waiting for it to happen, but it’s actually about really working on yourself and finding your sense of self-worth. It’s a self-development process, and it’s changed everything for me.

I thought I was destined to be unhappy, but now, every day, I experience joy. And while I still have moments of self-doubt, as everyone does, I’m so grateful that I can now walk into a room and feel confident to be myself. When I think back to the early years of my life, that feels like a miracle.

That’s why I’m so passionate about Manifest for Kids. It’s the most important book I’ve written, and if I died tomorrow, I would want it to be my legacy. I have a son, Wolfe, but it goes beyond him. Maybe it’s because I have such a wounded inner child, but I’ve always cared so much about children. As adults, we have so much influence over them, and I believe it’s our collective responsibility to help equip them for the challenges they’ll face throughout their lives.

If the younger me had had the tools to help me understand what I was feeling and why other children were doing what they did, I might never have lost all those years to self-loathing. But social media means there’s so much more pressure on young people now – so much more of a complicated landscape to navigate - and an even greater need for those tools now than when I was growing up. We know children’s mental health is in decline, and we urgently have to find ways to help them help themselves.

The book is split into four steps: Understanding Our Emotions, Self-Belief, Gratitude and Goal-Setting. Within those, I introduce kids to as many easy-to-follow self-development tools as I could pack in – everything from breathing exercises, meditation, journaling and affirmations to how to train your brain to focus on the good things in your life and persist through challenges when trying to reach a goal.

My hope is that as many children as possible read it, realise their unique worth and feel more equipped to handle whatever comes their way. If I can prevent even one of them from feeling the way I did that afternoon in the phonebox, I’ll have achieved something so worthwhile.

Manifest for Kids: Four Steps To Being The Best You by Roxie Nafousi is available here.

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