What happens when a child experiences a reality no one else seems willing to name?
What does a gift become when there is no elder to help you hold it?
How do you learn to trust yourself when the world keeps insisting you’re too strange to be trusted?
I was the weird kid. Talking to ghosts as early as I can remember, checking out books in the occult section on UFOs, séances, and all those unseen things that make a weird kid even weirder, at least by society’s standards.
The things I saw, I assumed everybody did… they were my reality and therefore must be true for others too, right?
And maybe that was the strangest part.
Reality never felt entirely real to me.
I remember sitting on my dad’s lap as a very small child trying to explain it.
Everything felt like a cartoon. Not imaginary exactly. Not fake.
Just pretend, “like a cartoon” as the only words a child can connect with.
As though the world was a bubbly overlay that somehow I didn’t quite belong inside of.
Years later, at an Elton John concert, I sat on the lawn beside my parents. Elton freakin’ John! His music was the soundtrack of my life, the anthems I danced and sang at the top of my lungs to. Here I should have been more present than ever taking in the reality of this moment, the threshold of sound once heard and now happening before me in real life.
Instead I found myself floating above it.
Looking down at thousands of tiny lighters flickering in the dark while Elton soulfully called out Candle in the Wind.
Even beauty didn’t always keep me in my body.
That was normal to me.
At least I thought it was.
I grew up in Louisiana in the 80s, during a time when satanic panic and the occult was a more dirty word than the true horrors going on in the shadows.
Those horrors run thick in the South. The masks worn by preachers and politicians who, behind closed doors, were committing the most heinous actions, while their billboards smiled and extolled morals opposite to the lives they actually lived.
It was impolite to speak of such things, but as a psychic kid, I knew who could be trusted and who couldn’t. Who was lying and who was truly virtuous.
Even while the adults smiled and faked it, there was a little piece of me that couldn’t take the pill and look away.
That’s the thing with being a kid, you don’t yet know that people can be standing in the same room and living in entirely different realities.
And yet when I would speak about my visions, my visitations, my knowing… Friends would run.
For real, honey, two friends lost when I was 8, one leaving the school entirely, the other calling me just before my birthday to say she no longer wanted to be friends.
Betrayal was the closest word I could find at that point in time, but even that’s a very big concept for a child of eight.
It hurt, the abandonment, yes, but underneath that the rejection. The affirmation from my own peers that I was somehow dangerous.
But here’s the thing, I knew that what I was touching somehow made me feel vibrantly alive. I loved the ghost stories! Give them all to me. I loved the UFO accounts, few and far between back in those days, yet still dusty tomes existing sitting on a library bookshelf.
To be the kid perusing this section and checking things out made me even more of a pariah. Adults whispering behind my back, shame and judgment thick on their tongue.
By god, it didn’t deter me, not even one bit, but it did make me feel painfully alone.
As though who I was was unacceptable.
Perhaps more than family trauma (my parents are truly good salt of the earth midwesterners) that’s where my sense of unlovable locked in.
In those marshy lands of Louisiana, the plants talked, the earth sang, and I could lose myself for hours talking to and playing with the vibrancy of life all around me.
I knew I wanted to be a shaman though can’t say where the word or the language for it even came from.
Voodoo was near, spoken in hushed tones, all around me and it felt both desirable and dangerous. A hunger for this level of contact with the unseen.
I also knew Voodoo wouldn’t be where I found acceptance. My skin was the wrong color. I had no elders to guide me, no one to show me the ways I knew in my heart.
People romanticize psychic abilities.
I was reading You Are Psychic and playing telepathic games with playing cards by six. I wanted to be psychic, yes, without consciously ever putting together that I was.
Not just a little psychic but so much so it scared people.
Of course I took it personally, sensitive lil feely Cancer.
I couldn’t distinguish that they were scared of something inside of me, something I could touch that they would rather reject entirely.
They weren’t scared of me. Sweet lil toothy bowl-cut kid. They were scared of what I represented, and what might have to be true if I was.
So I did as any sensitive being may and began to hide.
It was built into my Cancerian nature after all. A natural empath, I could feel the climate of a room and learn to navigate within it.
Good girl was a costume I wore with great glee assuming it as identity. As my friend Kendra said recently, my function became an identity.
I was by default the one who felt everything in the house. The only one doing so it seemed and I learned to respond to others masterfully.
The unprocessed, repressed emotions lingered like fog around me. I assumed they were mine to tend, fix, soothe, or clean up. I learned to become valuable by feeling what others left behind.
I also learned the parts of me not to show. The stories others would recoil from.
But fuck I was just a a kid and sometimes a piercing truth would slip out.
I’d say what was being hidden. It felt, and still feels, like a neon sign flashing, “Don’t look here.” And I’d simply blurt it out.
The thing someone was trying to hide was never in the shadows to me. It sat in plain sight.
Never did I imagine that my saying it (oh the horror) would be problematic.
It was sitting right there, and I’d pick it up like a match waiting to be struck. Totally innocent and unaware of the complicated social norms at play around me.
So I was called tactless, rude, or even worse… evil.
Baby, I didn’t only feel these things in the way a sensitive child imagines herself judged. I heard it. From teachers. From librarians. From adults who thought I was just far enough away not to understand what they were saying.
I saw Shirley MacLaine’s Out on A Limb on tv… 1987 if you’re keeping score.
I didn’t just watch it as some 11 year old kid, I felt seen in it. It spoke to some part of me no one else could see.
Of course, like any tender young thing, I wanted to be like her.
For years, she became an archetype within my imagination and in my dreams. I felt a kinship with her, in our shared weirdness and in our shared Irish heritage.
What I didn’t know then is I needed an elder.
Someone who wasn’t afraid of me. Nor on guard because of what I might perceive.
Someone who didn’t seem to be hiding from herself.
Someone living close enough to her own truth that mine didn’t feel like a threat.
Someone who could look directly at the things I saw and say: “Yes, sweetheart. That happens.”
Someone who could guide me, make me not feel so alone, and affirm I wasn’t crazy.
I don’t know that crazy is what I felt more than pervasively outside it all, at a cool distance from everyone else.
I tried to be like them, to look and act like they did, and yet it always betrayed me.
An insight would pop out, or I’d share some wild ghostly encounter in an attempt to connect, and somehow it always left me more alone than before.
I kept parts of myself deeply hidden. My fascinations still strong but rarely shared. Try as I might to bury my abilities, they only amplified in puberty.
An afternoon at 13 shook me to the core.
We visited a house where a triple murder had occurred. And love, the freaking 90s-- no Google, no social media, I had no way of knowing what had happened there.
But entering the room I felt it. I trembled, vomit gurgling in my belly, feeling what was unsaid, unknown, but experiencing it as real as anything I knew.
My dad placed his arms around my shoulder and ushered me from the house.
By 14 I thought I had to be schizophrenic. The voices, the visions, the way my reality appeared to be categorically different than others. I was either a mutant or a deviant.
My precious lil inner nerd turned to the only resource I could trust, the library. Hoping to piece together what was wrong with me.
Traits of schizophrenia, at least as I understood from the books I could find:
Experiencing reality differently from others.
Hearing or seeing things others did not.
Hallucinations.
A loosening relationship with what others agreed was real.
These words loomed over me not with fear necessarily, but with recognition. I didn’t know then that a child can’t read pathology with nuance.
I researched it meticulously and could come to no other conclusion. How else but schizophrenia could I be experiencing and living in a reality so different than others.
Either I was crazy.
Or reality was much stranger than anyone around me was willing to admit.
I dutifully asked to see my family doctor, to share my discovery, and to learn what could be done to help me.
She, so empathetic, so kind, patted my hand gently and readily reassured me it wasn’t schizophrenia. But… she had someone she wanted me to meet.
A therapist I assumed was there to diagnose, to label, to finally speak plainly what was wrong with me.
I was fairly certain a psych ward may be my next destination.
I spilled my guts to her that first session, laying everything before her like a puzzle needing to be put together immediately. Oversharing to a radical degree so nothing was left unseen.
And instead, I met a woman who had trained with Native Americans and was practiced in regressive hypnotherapy.
Terri didn’t judge, didn’t take notes, nor seem at all bothered by what I shared.
Instead, she was warm and funny. Understanding, steady, and somehow unsurprised.
She didn’t diagnose me. She listened, and slowly began to offer a framework. I wasn’t crazy, there were others like me, and that eventually even perhaps what I “suffered from” could be used to help others.
Finally, I had someone like me, someone who could guide me, someone who could breach all the doors that I didn’t know how to find inside me.
To have landed here was a relief, to have language and context for not just what I was experiencing but could also guide me through the wounds I had gained from this strange and lonely walk as a teenage psychic.
If reality never feels entirely real, leaving becomes easy.
I learned to stay outside of my body far more than within it.
I could live outside of it, hover above it, astral project as if it was strolling through the neighborhood, talk to the unseen as if picking up the phone.
And the dangers of this, not just to a young psychic, but to what I didn’t know I was opening myself up to… honey, it’s a true miracle I’ve made it here at all.
My biggest gift wasn’t in being psychic. For me it was love.
I was never alone, cast aside by those who loved me.
My parents, self proclaimed simple people, likely had these gifts too left untended and undeveloped.
Neither they, nor I, could explain what I was experiencing but I was never made wrong for it.
They didn’t ship me off to a wilderness rehab for troubled teens. They didn’t mock my sensitivities. Or shush my radical little knowings.
They loved me for me and tried to protect me even when they didn’t know what they were facing.
That’s the true wonder of it all. That even in the face of the unseen, they didn’t flinch.
My parents were there, bless them.
But what I needed was an elder.
A grandma who can pass on the wisdom, an auntie who can usher in the gifts without such volatile doubt.
Someone to guide me into the Mystery who has gained the wisdom from walking through it.
Thank god Shirley MacLaine stepped in de facto for me.
What I needed most was not proof.
It was witness.
Regardless of what reality I was in, the web was still holding me.
The Akasha guiding me into place and providing resource before I ever had a name for it.
It delivered Shirley MacLaine to an eleven-year-old child sitting in a trailer, exactly when I needed her.
It brought me to the library, to my doctor, and eventually to Terri.
The path of a lonely teenage psychic was certainly precarious. But in walking so much of it alone, I became the kind of elder I needed.
Someone who can walk beside another and say, “You’re not crazy.”
Someone who has walked through the fires of the unknown and returned more whole.
Someone who can guide others through the dark night, holding their hand as they step, trembling and radiant, into the extraordinary thing they are becoming.
Where in your life did you need witness more than proof?
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