The path from “weird” to acceptance

As you’ll read in this blog, I have had a lot of unique experiences, things that our current scientific paradigm and culture say don’t and can’t happen. I have spent a lifetime knowing that I can’t make up the things I’ve experienced, yet I have actively hidden myself, seeking to pass as “normal” so that people wouldn’t find out the truth about me and what I perceived as my oddness. I assume I will be rejected, made fun of or worse (though I am not sure what that would be).

I did tell my family as a kid that I was afraid of the things I sensed, heard and felt (thank goodness my gifts don’t include seeing much). I think my parents didn’t really know what to do with my fears. I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, without the Internet and cable TV featuring ghost hunting shows. Having a paranormal experiences wasn’t something people, or my family, talked about. Instead, we just went on with life and I tried to push away my fear.

As a young kid, the inaccurate message I took away from that is that my fears and complaints were not valid, that my experiences weren’t valid, that my own reality was not valid. I felt shame, that I must be a bad person for these experiences if my own family didn’t couldn’t validate them. I was shy and insecure, thinking I was a weird person and out of step with my my peers. I didn’t feel all that safe in the world, and I assumed that if people really knew about me and what I sensed that I would be rejected and ridiculed.

The experiences continued and I was drawn to all things paranormal, most likely in an effort to make sense of myself. I didn’t have people to talk to about any of it, though. I grew up anxious and hypervigilant, always aware of what was around me, both consciously and unconsciously. My nervous system stepped into high alert at an early age. I didn’t sleep well. I was afraid of the dark and had a hard time sleeping alone until high school. I shoved away my oddness as much as I could, wanting to fit in and be accepted.

In many ways, my strategy worked. I have achieved the Western cultural success milestones – education, marriage, a stable job, good friends and family, etc. But despite this, for much of there has been a hole that I couldn’t fill. I could feel it physically, in my solar plexus. Until recently, I did not understand that this hole was the physical sense of being incomplete. I had “hidden” myself to a high degree to “pass” for normal that I couldn’t feel my whole self. It meant that I was detached from my thoughts, feelings, insights and opinions. I couldn’t access much of myself, which caused some depression and anxiety. I lived this way for years.

I am finally, in my 50s, learning that the only way to fill this hole is to just be myself and claim fully who I am. It sounds simple, but I arrived here only after years of therapy and journaling, reading about spirituality and the paranormal, stepping my toe into things like Reiki and energy healing and starting to meet people who also experience the anomalous and paranormal. It’s also been a godsend that it turns out my sister also shares my interests and some related experiences and we can spend hours discussing this stuff.

The tipping point in becoming open about who I am to the point that I am writing a blog is a brief message exchange on Zoom with someone in a nine-month leadership development program I was in through work. I was telling him that I thought I wanted to do some kind of writing, like a blog, to explore all of what I experience but was afraid of judgment or not having an audience. He gave me simple, yet profound, advice. “Why not just write it for yourself?” I thought it was a revolutionary idea! I felt empowered to start writing. I also wrote an essay about how these experiences make me who I am, in a good way. I had to read that essay to my leadership cohort, and aloud at graduation. I finally stepped into my truth in public, and there is no turning back now! I am already finding that being open and writing helps me feel freer and more content, more settled into myself.