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Last night I was looking at my calendar about a foot away from me when I saw a figure walk by my right side. It followed the path of my mother walking to her sewing table, so I started talking to her.

“Hey, are there any more of those mini chocolate cupcakes?”

No response. My mother is 75% deaf due to an accident with firecrackers as a child, so I thought she didn’t hear me. I asked again and still there was no response. I looked up and there was nobody there. Confused, I looked behind me and nobody was there either. A few minutes later, my mother came out of the bedroom on the other side of my apartment. She hadn’t walked by me at all, leaving me to the conclusion that it was another spirit.

Believe it or not, sometimes I still get creeped out even though I was born with this issue. I wasn’t in “intuitive mode” so I wasn’t even thinking about spiritual matters. It just happened.

I was up late last night again, unable to sleep as usual. There is nothing like the blackness of night to make a person feel completely alone in the world even under the best of circumstances. Slowly my thoughts drifted to what it might be like to actually live under the best of circumstances, a life not plagued by the feeling of responsibility for so many other souls. At any given time, I have dozens of people metaphorically pulling at my clothes asking for help because they just can’t handle things without guidance from a higher place. I remember sometimes when people used to look at me as a small child and tell my mother how eerie it was that I clearly exist with one foot in the spirit world and one foot in the physical world. I didn’t understand what they meant, being a little girl, but I become more and more acutely aware of it as I grow older.

I will be 30-years-old in February. As much as I have accomplished professionally, it seems like my personal life has been stagnate for a long time. Virtually all of the people who went to high school with me are now married with at least one child. Are they happy? I wonder that a lot when I come across them. That’s the thing about living in the South – you never really get away from the expectations people put on you when you were too young to really understand those expectations. I seem to be more aware now that I keep pushing off that ultimate personal relationship, not for a lack of desire, but more because of the underlying truth that the scope of people who would actually understand my life is so limited. The average person has no way of understanding what it means to live with an intuitive (or sensitive, medium, clairvoyant, psychic, etc., etc., etc.). We are night owls. We often struggle to sleep more than a few hours at a time. Some of us who are empathic feel crippling depression when worldwide tragedies happen. We are never really alone but we often feel lonely and misunderstood. We are basically “on call” constantly because spiritual problems don’t keep store hours. Regular people never seem to understand it enough to accept it as such a huge part of our lives. Giving it up is not really an option either, which is something that people rarely understand. It’s like trying to give up what you are, not just quitting your job. People can’t give up being their race or their gender any more than they can give up being intuitive.

I have so very few people who understand what my life is. Most of it is just because I simply don’t talk about it in constant detail. There are some parts of it that I talk about regularly but most of it I don’t – just as a doctor wouldn’t talk about his patients. I have two or three friends who I’ve known for so many years that I can talk about it if I need to but even then, my best friend since high school often says, “You’re the only one I know who has personal relationships with dead people.” I know. And when new people find out about what I am, I shrink into myself and clam up because I don’t know what they’re really thinking. I’m an intuitive, not a telepathic. For all I know, new people could be thinking, “This chick is crazy. Lock her up!” So that makes it tough to get closer to new people in my life. I live behind a wall and look out of the window at the rest of the world once in a while.

I’m not particularly interested in being married. I already went through that once with the big flashy ring and the man who walked all over me like a piece of property. Love is the joining of souls who enhance each other’s lives, not a piece of paper that says I’m legally bound to serve you for the rest of my life. Real, honest, genuine love from the purest place in the soul is so much bigger than the confines of marriage and even the short existence of this body. Love is holy. Marriage was invented for control. I want to find someone who loves me for every part of me, not just the “normal” parts. A big part of me doubts that I will find that in this lifetime. I have had it in previous lives and the burden of remembering it makes my standards high and I’m just not willing to settle for good enough. The life of someone who works with one foot in the spirit world and one foot in the physical world is fulfilling but lonely at the same time. I’m aware that I’m doing my best to help humanity evolve in my little ways but I’m aware that being public with who I am means I’m sacrificing a lot too.

Sometimes I meet some men who are involved with this way of living too but those relationships haven’t turned out well. I have found out the hard way that a certain level of ego skyrockets among some intuitives when they begin to realize their influence over people. It’s so easy to slip into taking the abilities into some dark place. If there is the slightest bit of an ego or something dark in a person, the realization of intuitive abilities is like throwing gasoline on that blaze. My ex-fiance didn’t bother to tell me until we were living together that he was involved in demonic activities. I only questioned him when the demonic activity he attracted started coming after my brother and me (a subject that I still can’t talk about openly without fear). Long after we broke up, I was involved with a man who was a medium and also had the ability to get into people’s minds in a way that I had never previously witnessed. Both of them turned their raw abilities into a means to exert control over things they should never have touched, whether it was other people or spiritual forces. I have yet to meet a man who uses his intuitive abilities for goodness and light rather than darkness and control in things that aren’t meant to be controlled. I know there are genuinely good spiritual men out there with honest intentions. I can name a few. I haven’t found one for my own though.

On another side of the issue, I have tried engaging men who are not involved with this way of life. That never goes well either. They’re either not strong enough to walk with me in the demands of my life or they refuse to believe it’s real by patting me on the head and pacifying me. I am not a woman to be patted on the head or pacified. While I am feminine and loving to those who I really do love, I’m also tough as nails just to survive coping with everybody else’s heartache – dead and alive – as well as my own. This is not a life for a sweet Susie Homemaker. It’s a long running joke with my best friend that I keep my feeling locked in a box with dust on it and she says I’d be bosom buddies with Pam on True Blood. I suppose a tough woman not willing to be totally dependent on a man to define herself can be a bit threatening to them.

So I go on doing my work because I have no other choice. I would like to know what real intimacy and trust feels like with another person but I seem to be a bit of a puzzle that men can’t put together right. Sometimes they force the wrong pieces together and I break. I can’t change what I am. I talk to dead people. I do readings for people to help my income along while I figure out what else I can do with these abilities. I write books with the sole purpose of helping people realize their own potential. My whole life is wrapped up in helping other people. It’s a full life but it’s an isolated life too. Who could really understand it? That question remains to be answered.

I write blogs like this, not because I particularly enjoy exposing my emotions and insecurities, but because there seems to be this romantic idea of what an intuitive, medium, psychic, etc., really is. People watch shows like Ghost Whisperer or see “TV mediums” like John Edward and think everything works within the context of that show and then the intuitive goes home to their loving family, having rescued spirits and their families from decades of turmoil. It’s never that simple. It’s not something you can just turn off, and not all bad spirits can be turned good with just a little reasoning and comfort. Our work follows us home much of the time. Our families have to put up with it too. My very skeptical uncle has been in my apartment and literally had his clothes pulled, heard voices, footsteps, etc., all by spirits. He always freaks out and leaves. And he’s my own blood family! My point is to help you understand this life and how difficult and rewarding it can be. I get tired and I get lonely but I do feel like I’m making a difference in my own way. Some people, I suppose, are just not meant to share their lives with someone else.