In a previous entry, Finding Out You Might be Psychic, I came out of the proverbial psychic closet. Here’s some background on my spiritual journey and how being a psychic or an intuitive fits into my ever-evolving understanding of the universe.
The Buddha
I was raised in a Therevada Buddhist family. Not the Zen kind. Not the Fat Buddha kind. The kind where you see golden statues depicted in many Southeast Asian countries. Statues with long earlobes and a flame on top of the Buddha’s man-bun. He was a wise man that taught how to get out of karma’s cycle. What is karma? You do good onto others and good will be done onto you. You do bad onto others or don’t listen to what your parents are telling you to do, and bad karma will follow. Bad or good karma will always find you. That’s just the way of the universe. And you either build up enough good karma points in your karma bank to be reincarnated into a human in the next life or you might come back as a cockroach. Depending on how much bad karma you have racked up, would determine where you are re-born in Earth’s food chain. Let’s say you meditated a bunch in this lifetime and followed the Eightfold Path, you could attain enlightenment, die, and reach Nirvana or what I would like to call “Buddhist Heaven.” It’s where you become one with the universe, not needing to return to a human life form and be reincarnated again and again. I was told this was very hard to do and would require many lifetimes of reincarnation to achieve. And hell, as I understood it, was a place you were sent to for self-inflicted punishment. If your karma was so bad, you didn’t even come back as a cockroach and instead, you were sent to hell, you must have done something really baaaaad. As a kid, this was how I understood my religion.
Once, there was this white girl that lived across the street from me for about a year. She terrorized the neighborhood. Her name was Sarah. We were both about eight years old. I think she was from Kentucky or somewhere in the Midwest. Wherever it was, it was rough. She cursed a lot and used the N word to describe black people. She told me that if my family and I didn’t believe in Jesus, then we were all going to hell. But I told her this couldn’t be. I once saw a picture of a monk shaking hands with the Pope. In Thai, the word for monk, “Pra,” is interchangeable with the word for Buddha. And if the Pope is the highest human incarnation of God, then the photo was a representation that the Buddha and God were on good terms. And yeah, I was pretty convinced the Buddha had put in a good word for me with God.
So there was no going to hell for me… unless, I had decided to make a deal with the Devil.
The Devil
When I was about 13 years old, I found myself miserable, immobile, and alone. My 8th-grade year was cut short and I was sent to Thailand, a country I was born in, but moved away from when I was two. It was never a place I called my home, living with a father who I had grown distant from. Alone, tired, pulled away from everyone and everything I knew, I thought I had hit the lowest point in my life. Little did I know there would be so many more to come!
I wanted it to go back to a happier time when things were simpler… Back when I was in 7th grade, dating the cutest and most popular guy in school Jamie McRaymond (name changed for anonymity). I had a good group of friends, attended a good school, got good grades and placed in advanced classes. Things were fine and dandy. Until things went downhill. A girl named Katie, who was dating Jamie’s twin brother, Bryce, had started a rumor that Jamie was going to break up with me. So in order to save face, I broke up with Jamie first. I found out later it was all a ploy… Katie really had the hots for Jamie, but settled for Bryce. Now that I was out of the picture, she could make the movies on Jamie. But Jamie declined her advances and I was a pawn in all of it. I cried, not necessarily because Jamie meant that much to me. But because I got played, dammit.
Things just kept getting worse after that. I had to change schools for 8th grade because someone found out we were using a family friend’s address to attend that better school. In reality, we lived in the next town over. I then had to change schools, be put in a new environment, and repeat a bunch of classes because the school district I moved to didn’t have advanced placement. I was pissed, but I tried to make the best out of it. I eventually made new friends and started dating a new guy who I met through my cousin… And then that guy decided he was going to cheat on me. When I found out, the next series of events happened quickly.
- I grabbed my backpack, left a note on the table, and headed out the door.
- My mother followed me in her car.
- It was raining.
- She told me to get in the car.
- She thought I was running away from home again.
- I just wanted to talk to my friend, who lived down the street.
- I got in the car.
- We passed my friend’s house.
- I got out of the car.
- But the car was still moving.
- Until it was not moving and stopped on top of my ankle.
- We went to two hospitals that night.
- There were two comminuted fractures.
- My mother told me she hated me that night…
- That all I ever did was cost her money and pain.
Not so long later, I was sent to live with my father in Thailand. Cold, immobile, and alone, I thought about making a deal with the Devil. Before this, I had previously attempted suicide by overdosing on about 20 Tylenols. But all that happened was I had gone to sleep and woke up the next day with what felt like a hangover. So in this very low point I was in, I began to write the Devil a letter. It went something like this…
Dear Devil,
I don’t know if you exist, but if you do. I would like to go to sleep tonight and wake up back to the first day of seventh grade. I want to start my life over again, knowing what I know now. I would do things differently and try to get along with my mother more. In exchange, if you can make this happen, I will give you my soul after I die.
Sincerely…
At that moment, as I was about to sign the letter, the lights in the entire. building. went. out.
It was pitch black.
I ripped up the letter in my hand and shouted, “Nevermind! I am not making this deal!”
And then the power came back on.
I truly believe that something saved me that night. I didn’t wake up the next day at a reverted time. I woke up the next day and decided to face life and the many other low points I would encounter.
God
After ankle surgery and living in Thailand for 6 months, I promised my parents that I would “be good” if they sent back to America. They did send me back. I tried to live by their rules, but it was hard. I was trying to live a “normal” kid life: go to school, hang out with my friends. Because my mother was raising three kids in the states without my father, the responsibilities of caretaker and fell onto me. When I didn’t want to take on that role, my mother became physically abusive. It started at around age 9. So by this time, it had been going on for 5 years.
I remember getting hit with plastic coat hangers, cable wires, and was sometimes tied to a chair with rope. Once, she had me strung up with my hands tied behind my back and hanging where I can barely stand on my tip toes. The physical abuse was just part of it. The mental abuse was worse.
So I snuck out of the house and I ran away from home… until I was caught and sent back to live with my father again. My parents were afraid I was running away to get involved with drugs and gangs. I had no interest in them whatsoever. I just wanted to be a kid, go to school, and hang out with my friends. But this second time in Thailand, my entire family decided to uproot, move back, claiming it was for my sake because I had gotten too out of control. The abuse became worse and to rebel against my parents, I would show them. Whatever they were afraid I turn into, I would make sure I turned into. I spiraled down a self-destructive pattern of drugs, of alcohol, of sex, of self-inflicted pain. Some days, I had no will to live let alone do well in school. I tried to put an end to life again by drowning myself in a bathtub, but I eventually came up for air.
The only hope I had was to one day go back to America, live far away from my parents, and see my friends again. I asked my mom what it would take for them to send me back to the states. “Get straight A’s,” she said. But how? I was drowning in a cesspool of self-pity I had created. To make matters worse, while I was trying to numb the pain and torture of abuse at home, I probably had the worst reputation in this new school I had started as a ninth grader. My family thought I was a failure, my peers and my teachers thought I was a failure. How was I supposed to magically turn things around?
It was around this, the end of my Freshman year of high school, I was being introduced to different elements of spirituality. I had a sweet Muslim friend who said to me, “If you pray to God, He will answer your prayers.”
I didn’t know of a God… but what did I have to lose? So one summer day, I was alone in my room, feeling hopeless and dismayed. I opened the closet door and in it was a mirror, I looked in the mirror, closed my eyes, and decided to pray. I said, “God, if you exist, please help me change.” What happened next was nothing short of a miracle.
I closed my closet door, opened my eyes. Beyond the horizon, lay patches of clouds. In the distance, I saw a bright, white light rushing towards me in a burst of energy. It was so bright and so strong, it knocked me onto the floor. I thought the wind was knocked out of me, except, when I went to stand, I didn’t feel winded at all. I got up and looked around to see if that light was still there. Where did it come from? What was it? I had no idea what it was, but I did know that something was different. Something inside me had changed. There was a new hope that I felt in my chest and at a soul-level, I knew that I had the power to change. There was a new sense of worth, purpose, and I felt like I could do whatever it was I decided to put my mind to.
To me, that was enough proof that God exists. I bet whatever it was that saved me from bargaining my soul away with the Devil was waiting for this moment to arrive. Darkness fell upon me and I was living in the shadows, but it was a light that eventually saved me. Like figuratively and like, quite literally too.