The Authentic Eclectic
How Fear Cornered Me Like a Malevolent Ghost
Until I let love vanquish it
Throughout my life, I was scared in my various homes, and I was scared in my own skin. My first childhood home had a sign on the door, “No Solicitors!” If anyone dared knock, my dad would boom them away with his pounding voice, “Did you read the sign? No Solicitors!”
I was an uneasy child, feeling in my bones someone was trying to get me, kidnap me, physically, or sexually assault me. The world was rough and rife, and I was defenseless and powerless against it. After all, I was small, at four or ten or twelve.
When I was thirteen, I watched enough daytime talk shows to know to glare down suspicious-looking people and which way to clutch my house key, so I could use it as a weapon when walking home — if needed.
I felt the presence of the crimes on my streets, in my cities, in the people I’d meet. In my teens:
A decapitation occurred at the gas station up the street. Rumor said the head rolled like a tumbleweed. I couldn’t erase the imagined scene.
I’d often cut through an apartment complex where a shooting murder took place. It felt like I was walking through ghosts.
When I walked down my street and saw the abandoned hotel with mattresses pushed vertically in the windows and tried to peek, my curiosity was answered by a sex worker or drug addict or both yelling at me, “Get lost, kid!”
My neighbor, Jason, shot and died in his own home. Who did it, still unknown.
College-aged, a friend offering his glass eye for a dance, “Aimée, I’d give you my right eye for a dance,” he held his hand towards me, his glass eye resting in his palm. As a kid, he’d been sexually assaulted walking through a park or a golf course. A survivor, using humor and drugs to cope.
This list is brief and grew as I grew. My fear multiplied as I internalized humankind’s capacity for executing the horrible and atrocious.
Later, as an adult, I'd carry Mace and a pocket alarm when I went running — not trusting my reflexes to bring a rape whistle to my mouth and blow. But, pushing an emergency button in my pocket — yes — that only required one motion.
The walls of my homes didn’t feel like a fortress. They didn’t feel safe. My buzzing psycho-empathic mind couldn’t get a break.
Walls felt like invisible portals to violence, sadness, and shame. My mind a canyon for psychic unease and cording — unhealthy cording being when people lock into the minds of healers and psychics, pulling our energy — often unaware — energy vampires. They’d tumble, parachute, rocket through the air toward me. It was exhausting.
On our street is a widower who fought in the army. He barely leaves home — usually just to pick up a fast-food meal. My husband has delivered him Thanksgiving and New Year's Day food, dropped it on the hermit’s doorstep. His history is complicated and threaded with fear, grief, and who-knows-what. We are all complicated. I feared the sadness emanating from his home.
In every home I’ve lived in as an adult, I’ve wondered if some awful crime has taken place within its walls. I’ve wondered if someone died in the place where my bed now rests, the garage, or the living room. What fights and unpleasantries took place? I’ve let the idea of evil and pain permeate the air in my fortresses, my homes.
I’ve walked barefoot on desert-hot
sharp stones and jagged rocks.
Let my psyche be infiltrated by
injustices out of my control:
violence, assaults
negative vibrations pulling me
into a tightly coiled ball of fear.
Scared to leave the house,
the house which is not safe
for the world which is not safe.
This is anxiety amplified
by psychic energy, empathy, and cording.
This pit, this canyon,
this void of love
took away my passion for living.
I tumbled, tumbled, tumbled
down into depressions repeatedly.
One summer, a rapist, released from jail, went on a rampage, assaulting women in their homes at night. The police never caught him. That summer, I held my kids tight, didn’t let them play outside. I was terrified. It’s the only time I’ve seriously considered owning a gun but settled for Mace by the front door, went on high alert, at-the-ready for beating the shit out of an intruder. This went on for months until I heard the news on the 4th of July. He’d wrapped his car around a light pole on the highway — and died. I was relieved this maniac was gone. Still, my body, my home, my neighborhood didn’t feel safe.
Because humans are mortal, neighborhoods are where we see both life and death staged. I’ve lived in apartment complexes where suffering humans felt my empathy and, like leeches, attached to my energy. They likely weren’t aware of this vampirism, but it hurt me. It took years to build the skill to cut the psychic bond and navigate through this type of energy.
One of my recent teachers wondered if my unease in my homes could be from ancestral trauma, from my great grandmother, born in the Pale of Settlement, a land designated to Jews outlawed from living in other areas of Russia. She lived in a pogrom. In the early 1900s, she escaped to America.
Pogrom, a Russian word meaning, “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.”
My great grandmother rarely discussed the place where she was born and adamantly did not claim it as home. Intuitively, it makes sense. Has she been wandering, lost, threading through her great-granddaughter’s psyche, reminding me that nowhere is safe? They’ll come for you — for us, pillage and rape and erase — if we’re not careful?
In my thirties, I was finding my inner voice, my truth. I lay in bed in a meditative state and threw back my head in an intuitive voice opening, ready to speak with wisdom. It felt amazing. And, then, the vision. My neighbor, a noose around his neck, a relief in the release of hanging. He occupied my mind. His in-between ghost wandered my home. I couldn’t escape. For months, our energies were dancing, merged, entwined, enmeshed. I was uneasy, fearful, scared, and depressed.
My healer neighbor came to me to release birth trauma, suicide trauma, and psychic trauma. Something was shoved off a shelf by neither of us confirming there are in-between worlds among us. I confided my bottomless fear. She said, “People always have such fear. If you were given the choice to go toward the light or the dark, which would you choose?” “The light,” I said. That’s all I needed to hear. Apparently, it’s common for energy workers to fear ourselves, our psyches, and question if we are, indeed, evil. This was my first concrete lesson in knowing I am love. We are love.
So many stories in so many neighborhoods:
a deeply shy neighbor who passed away due to complications with HIV
a rapist running loose, kidnapping a little girl
a man leaning in a little girl’s window to grope her — her father chasing him away
a toddler molested by a repairman.
The stories of the bad things used to make me freeze in terror, helpless. The walls of my homes, unsafe.
The deeper I dig
let the craggy rocks slice my skin
I know we are all born of true love
and sometimes some evil things
flip us into terrorists.
Why? I don’t know.
As hard as it is to believe,
in my heart,
I know every soul is born pure
is essence of universes
upon universes unknown.
Beyond that,
we are all one.
Oneness and love
navigating earth-obstacles.
From fear we learn love.
My being no longer scares me.
My home is a fortress.
The universe is a canyon
of the deepest love.
In my yard, animals teach me.
The river runs under me and
roots intertwine with mycelial networks
life’s mysteries. Life is here to support us.
Bad things happen. It’s part of our earthwalk. Instead of dwelling on them, I ask for peace for the victims. I ask for peace for the perpetrators if I can get to that place. Getting to that place is not easy.
At night I go to the Bardo, a place of in-between on the astral plane. I’m told I help the stuck in-betweens cross into the next realm of their being. I trust in knowing what I’m doing. We’re all given the capacity to be healers, to allow and support life-force energy.
Something happened to me when I released my fear. I realized I’d been clinging to fear as protection. I thought the more I clung to fear, the more I’d be in control, able to be ready for any bad thing. But, this was flawed thinking. Now, I choose love to navigate the multiple feelings of our beings and complex atrocities. They don’t have to make sense. We must find our way to walk through when bad things happen. Love is perhaps our greatest superpower as human beings. Pure love. It can allow the most intimate pleasure and alleviate the worst pain.
When I finally released fear from its suffocating grip on my being, Love surfaced and imbued me with all the tools I needed. My home became a cradle of protection, my heart — my being filled with love. The air and the river running under my floorboards, my feet, the tree roots, everything held me. The canyon transformed from a pit of pain into a solace of love, on which I can rest for as long as I need. And, now, my fear dissipates and my being feels mostly at ease, especially in the fortress of my home.
