Shame

Never start a sentence with the words ‘No offense’.

Gretchen Rubin

Can I tell you something?

I struggle often, sometimes daily, with being who I am. Although I am accepting of who I am, I also carry a deep sense of shame about that, and I am working hard to parent myself out of this feeling that has been with me since I was young.

Does that surprise you?

I am psychic. I was born this way. I can’t turn it off, although I have learned to manage it better, hide it better, use it better. I have been made to feel ashamed of this part of me since I was a small child. It is a part of me I am still learning to love and accept. It’s a part of me I have often chosen to hide, so that I could have more normal interactions with those around me.

Once people know that I am ‘psychic’ it often changes my relationship with them. They think less of me, and step back. Or our relationship becomes transactional. They want something from me that is more than what they would want from another relationship. Not only that, many of the other parts of me become rendered ‘less than’ or invisible. I become less a person, and more a service.

I do things daily with which the ‘intellectual and rational’ parts of me wrestle. I’m more than intuitive. I’m psychic. I talk with Fairies, I hear Guides in my head and in the world around me, I see visions, I know things without knowing how I know. I’m not ashamed of the Fairies, or the Guides. I’m ashamed of how I wrangle with accepting this, still, after all these years.

I am ashamed of how I hate being perceived and judged as soon as I disclose my truth, of how difficult it is to share what I do openly, with everyone, without suffering negative consequences. I’m ashamed that I still waste time worrying what others think. I worry about how opening myself up to the world, being seen as I truly am, also opens me up to ridicule, contempt and even abuse. I struggle, as an intelligent and well-educated woman, with being something of which education and intelligence is so dismissive. I’m sad that our modern western culture is so contemptuous of my kind, and that there is no real place for me in it.

More and more I am open about who I am and how I live, because I want to normalise this, I want to create a safer and more accepting world for people like me. But I’m human. I hurt. People hurt me with the things they say – deliberately or unthinkingly. It wears me down.

Being psychic is not rational. It is not logical. It sounds… unhinged. And for all that I have people who know and understand me, and respect me and my work, I have so many more people who, upon finding out what I do (and what I do IS who I am – I have no choice in this), ridicule me, disrespect me, distance themselves from me, publicly shame or humiliate me, have contempt for me.

I can’t stop being WHO I AM. I can’t change it. When you reject what I do, you are also rejecting who I am. Even if I never worked as a psychic, being psychic is at the core of who I am, it’s in every cell, it’s my essence.

When I ran a successful corporate communications company and kept my psychic nature hidden I was treated very differently. I still run a successful business, but now that my business is based upon a set of metaphysical skills things have changed. Doctors, accountants, bankers, academics, service providers, business people, even some family members – If I have told them what I do now, they diminish me. Oh well, Nicole, as long as you’re happy… It’s such a waste of your life but it’s your choice I suppose… They cease to take anything I say seriously. They suggest I have a mental illness. They openly laugh at me, or talk smack to their friends or work colleagues about me, often right in front of me. They discriminate against me. They decline my requests for professional services. They distance themselves from me so that THEY are not judged (like the friend who asked me to a barbeque and then asked me to tell all her friends that I was a writer, because of how badly me being psychic would reflect on her). A business coach helpfully told me I would be better off lying about what I do, or watering it down, so that I could be taken seriously as a businesswoman. He said that being psychic was ‘offensive’ to most rational people. Another told me it that what I did was ‘worse than being a Hooker, because at least being a Hooker was an honest trade’.

But they remember what I do. They remember me.

And they seek me out – when they need guidance, when they are troubled, when they are deeply stuck or when their situation is desperate. They seek me out when strange things happen to them (things others might judge them for) and they want clarification, reassurance, guidance.

Just so you know, said an author as she interviewed me for a book she was writing, where one of the characters in her best-selling novels had supernatural powers and second sight, I don’t believe in anything you do. I’m just looking for authenticity or an edge for my character. Since then she has reached out several times to ask me a question, based on me using my abilities to guide or support her, or to inform her personal or career choices. When I enquired about why she kept asking me for help, based on her not believing in what I do, she laughed it off and said, ‘Oh, you’re my dirty little secret. I guess we all just want to believe people like you are real. It’s a human weakness.’

A contractor, on finding out what I did, expressed discomfort, and then told me that ‘being psychic was quite controversial’. Another told me they couldn’t work for me because ‘I was an abomination against God ‘.

Each of them were still happy to ask for guidance and insights though. Like the business coach who dissed me and then months later rang me in the middle of the night, because he was worried about his baby daughter. Whose life I helped save.

So many times, so many ways, I have been told I love you Nic, but if my circle knew I was friends with you I’d lose my… sponsorship, biggest clients, credibility, standing with everyone else who would judge me the way I secretly judge you too… even as I need you and value our secret relationship.

No offense, said a Proud Christian Man, an entrepreneur who has been a youth leader, missionary and is still a public speaker on a big Christian platform, but you’re like a Prostitute. I need your services, but I also need to keep you on the down low. I’m sure you understand. People like you are damaging to my brand. He laughed as he said it, as though it was funny.

No offense, right?

This is the same man who publicly ridiculed me at a business conference years before, including turning his chair away from me at shared tables, and telling me I was going to Hell.

You might say I need stronger boundaries. Yeah, maybe… But I will always help where I can, I’m compelled to serve. I’ve found something else to be true too – people change. Often, people who were my greatest critics, decades later, have become my strongest advocates.

I’m working on the shame thing, though. It’s tough. I wonder if I will ever get there.

But it wont’ stop me from being me. Or telling my story.

I will keep using Rumi to guide me on.

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,

your heart must forget about

shame

and dignity.

You are God’s lover,

yet you worry

what people

are saying.

 Rumi

Forget about shame? Sure. I’ll work on that. Dignity? Well, that’s part of the issue. I still struggle to let that go. Much love, Nicole xx