Before The Veil Lifted: Segments of A Working Memoir (Part 2)

I soon moved to Los Angeles and was majoring in Musical Theatre at UCLA, fully committed to my theatrical shenanigans and chasing a career onstage. The theatre was, and always had been, my refuge—a safe container where my intuition could run wild without judgment. Onstage, I could bounce energy back and forth with another soul, tell stories not my own but deeply familiar, and use my emotional body as a bridge to characters far beyond myself. It was also fun as hell.

During my time at college, I thought I was simply training to be an actress. I didn’t realize I was training to be intuitive. Think about it for a second. Vocal class introduced breathwork, an essential tool for grounding and cleansing the aura, though no one mentioned that in the syllabus. Funnily enough, the summer of 2021 found me on a Kundalini retreat in Joshua Tree—with my college voice professor, Mary Jo Duprey. She carried a guru energy, a witchy Mary Poppins presence that made perfect sense the moment I met her. And acting? Acting taught me the mysticism of presence.

Learning to master my energy—expanding, contracting, aiming, releasing. Learning to listen deeply, stay present, and deliver messages beyond my conscious mind. I was taught how to step fully into another emotional frequency without losing myself, or at least how to find my way back afterward. Looking back, it all feels painfully obvious. The stage wasn’t just passion—it was preparation. Every class, rehearsal, and emotional excavation sharpened the skills I would later rely on as an intuitive and energy worker.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make sense of all the tools I was being given. Instead, everything began to feel overwhelming—daunting—like I could hear and feel everyone at once. It wasn’t expansive. It was intrusive. I began absorbing the emotions, stresses, and energy of everyone around me—friends, students, family, even mentors.

I remember waking up on audition days feeling fresh and ready, striding confidently to the theatre building by the sculpture garden, thinking, Let’s fucking rock. Then, upon entering the waiting room, the air thickened, heavy with everyone’s hopes, fears, and secret insecurities. The weight pressed down. Thoughts swarmed uncontrollably: If I don’t book this show, I’m switching majors. If I don’t get this role, my parents will never believe in me. Oh God, I’m hungover. Please don’t let this be my audition. Then the physical onslaught began.

I felt the pounding headache and nausea of the frat boy—the musical theatre department’s token straight male—who’d partied too hard the night before. I sensed my best friend’s menstrual cycle and, surprise, I’d start cramping too. The pièce de résistance: my heart pounding as if it would leap from my chest while sweat dropped down the side of my neck, triggered by the professor secretly crushing on me, who just happened to be on the panel.

Now? I can laugh. Not the gut-busting ha-ha laugh—more like that nervous little chuckle that sneaks out when you know the road ahead is going to be a doozy, but you just don’t have it in you to say it yet. I’d wrap that frantic little ball of nerves in a warm embrace and gently tell her the storm inside her would one day unravel—that she wasn’t losing her mind, just finding her way—and that she never had to carry such heavy secrets alone. I’d also tell her to brush her damn hair and do her laundry. But back then? There was no fairy godmother, no guiding light, no cosmic compass to steer me through my empathic unraveling.

Beginning my sophomore year, I was living in a house in Westwood with four other girls. After spending freshman year in a single dorm—a blessing that probably saved me—I was suddenly sharing space with three other chaotic energy sources. Girls. Theatre girls. It was an estrogen overload. The collective energy under one roof sent me careening over the edge.

My spiritual toolkit at the time? Alcohol, weed, Xanax, and chain-smoking—anything to shut off the radio-static buzzing in my mind, to finally find some semblance of peace, even if it only lasted a few hours. I wasn’t chasing pleasure so much as silence. Quiet felt like survival. It was the only way I knew how to juggle my schedule, how to stay upright while pretending I was fine.

By the beginning of sophomore year, I’d been signed by a theatrical agent, which meant that in addition to full course loads and nightly rehearsals, I was auditioning professionally—ducking out of class to submit self-tapes, racing down Sunset Boulevard for callbacks, living in a constant state of readiness. My body was present, but my nervous system was fried. I was always bracing for the next demand, the next evaluation, the next moment I’d be asked to prove myself. My mind was constantly detached from my body. Eventually, my spirit followed.

I didn’t know how to rest without collapsing. I didn’t know how to say no. So I numbed. I inhaled. I swallowed. I lit another cigarette. Anything to slow the spin, to dull the edges, to quiet the sense that I was being pulled in too many directions at once. From the outside, it probably looked like momentum—ambition, drive, a young performer “doing the LA thing.” To anyone with a semblance of empathy or intuition, it was a master class in burnout. Inside, it felt like barely hanging on. I couldn’t hang. And I didn’t yet have the language to admit that what I was calling discipline was actually depletion, or that what I thought was resilience was really just endurance on borrowed time.

By mid-junior year, I was completely drained. Empty. I couldn’t do it anymore. Nothing made sense and I didn’t know how to take care of myself. Without learning discernment—how to separate whose emotions were mine and whose weren’t—I imploded emotionally, physically, and mentally. Waves of mood swings crashed over me. Restless nights stretched endlessly. Eventually, suicidal thoughts crept in like uninvited guests who refused to leave.

I finally reached a breaking point and realized that I had to come to terms with seriously considering stepping away from the program. It wasn’t just a break; it was a necessary act of survival, a way to do some much-needed soul searching and find a way to quiet the relentless noise in my mind. For so long, I’d been caught in a loop of self-judgment, beating myself up for not wanting to be there, even as I felt this invisible pull to please the people around me—my friends, my family, everyone whose expectations weighed heavily on my shoulders. The pressure was real, like a tightening knot in my chest that refused to loosen.

But amidst the chaos, one thing I give myself credit for is the act of surrender—the brave, messy choice to dive into uncharted waters and do what felt right for me, even if I was scared and utterly unsure of what lay ahead. It wasn’t easy. The uncertainty stretched out like a fog before me, thick and disorienting.

Finally, I decided to take the spring quarter off. I told myself it was time to get my shit together—to catch my breath, recalibrate, and find some semblance of peace. I spent days wandering outside my hometown through the Santa Rosa Plateau, sitting with journals filled with messy scrawls, and trying to listen beneath the roar of expectations. I was able to tune out listening to the raunchy likes of Liz Phair and Lana del Rey. The world outside seemed to slow down just enough for me to hear the whisper of my own truth.

Little did I know, stepping away wasn’t just an escape—it was a pivot. A door quietly swung open, and a bunch of opportunities started flowing toward me, unexpected and ripe with possibility. That pause became the turning point I didn’t know I needed, setting the stage for everything that was about to come.

I landed a bartending gig at a brewery in a quieter corner of town. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was grounding. The rhythmic motion of slinging beer and the noise of men rumbling about politics in their barstools ironically served as a kind of meditation, a momentary anchor amid the swirling currents inside me. Unlike the turmoil I’d faced at UCLA, here I had breathing room. There were pockets of laughter, easy camaraderie with regulars, and fleeting moments when I could simply be—no pressure, no chaos. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I could exhale fully. I started to learn how to find peace in chaos.

Later that year, something inside me sparked again—the pull of the stage. I returned to acting and performing with a hunger and urgency I hadn’t felt before. For three solid years, I worked professionally, moving through haunted theaters and gritty sets that smelled of old velvet curtains, dust, and the ghost of a thousand stories.

Performing wasn’t just a job; it became a vital outlet. With every role, every line, every movement, I dumped the heaviness I’d been carrying—the tangled emotions, the shadows from the past. The stage was a sanctuary where I could channel all that noise and pain into something alive and transformative. I carried a world inside me, and the universe demanded I dive into every corner. It was messy and beautiful, exhausting and exhilarating all at once.

The older I grew, the more I saw the quiet kinship between being intuitive and being creative. For those who move through life with intuitive or psychic gifts, that unseen channel flows through every fiber of their being—an endless current beneath the surface. Creatives also arrive in this world woven tight with vibrant, restless energy—a fire that longs to be shaped, to breathe. When left untended, that energy twists and tangles; thoughts become idiosyncratic, and days dissolve into haze.

I thought I’d finally found a fragile kind of balance—a way to shut off the chaos, to close the door on the psychic noise that had long buzzed beneath my skin. But the universe had other plans. The spiritual work was calling me back, louder and more persistent than ever, demanding that I stop running and start diving deep. I wish I could go back and tell myself it was going to happen, no matter if I fought it or let it. But honestly, that wouldn’t have been any kind of fun. The fight, the fear, the resistance—that’s what made it real.

Between 2015 and 2020, I lived in downtown Los Angeles—a city that felt like a living, breathing organism, pulsing with energy, secrets, and stories waiting to be told. I worked on a slew of projects, from haunted theaters echoing with old-world ghosts to film sets where shadows flickered just beyond the frame. The air in those spaces was thick with unseen presence; sometimes it felt electric, sometimes heavy with sorrow. It was a time of deep transformation—raw, intense, and utterly alive.

In those years, the empathy and psychic hits didn’t just resurface—they pushed, prodded, and pulled me into uncharted realms of seeing and sensing that I hadn’t fully dared to explore before. The gifts I’d once toyed with as a kid and during high school were no longer playful tricks or fleeting flickers of intuition. They demanded something new: focus, discipline, and a deep well of courage I wasn’t always sure I had.

It was a wild, unpredictable ride—sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exhausting—that reshaped everything I thought I knew about myself, the unseen world, and the invisible threads that quietly bind us all together. Answers remained elusive; I still had little to no definitive proof or explanation for what I was experiencing. But that didn’t matter. I was learning to surrender to the mystery, embracing the ride with a sense of wonder and openness.

I found myself seeing what others often refused to acknowledge—those quiet, subtle energies, the shadows lurking just beyond the edge of perception, the stories whispered by the spaces between moments. And rather than fear or doubt, I met these experiences with curiosity and a growing trust in the unseen. I began to explore, this time, without any shame.

One of the most thrilling paranormal encounters I ever had happened during none other than a show literally about psychic abilities—Carrie: The Musical, based on Stephen King’s infamous novel. After workshopping the show in La Mirada, we moved into the Los Angeles Theater for the official revival, nestled in the historic core of downtown LA. The building itself was something out of a dream—or maybe a ghost story.

Commissioned in the early 1930s as a glamorous movie palace, the ornate French Baroque style interior was dripping with gold leaf, sweeping velvet curtains, and crystal chandeliers that sparkled under layers of dust. It was a monument to an era of old Hollywood grandeur, with every creak in the floorboards whispering secrets of decades past.

Walking through its grand lobby, I felt like I’d stepped back in time. The heavy seats in the auditorium were faded and threadbare in places, but they held onto the echoes of countless audiences who had sat there, watching dramas unfold on screen. There was an undeniable energy in the air—a subtle hum that seemed to vibrate beneath the ornate ceiling and into the very walls.

One night during a tech rehearsal, I was perched up in the bleachers of our amphitheater-style set, waiting eagerly to experience the sound and lighting of the infamous destruction scene for the first time. After all, I played the sole survivor. The anticipation was electric. Suddenly, the theater came alive: lights sparked and exploded with a fierce intensity, the sound of doors slamming reverberated through the vast space, and the entire building shook beneath us. The wooden benches vibrated, and the air crackled with raw power, as if the ghosts of the theater were joining in the chaos.

Stunned, I turned around to share my awe with our director, Brady. But instead of the typical burst of excitement, something else took hold—I became a human popsicle. Brady still recounts the moment with absolute certainty. My jaw dropped, my face went pale, and my wide eyes shifted upwards, past him, locking onto the balcony behind. He watched as my gaze followed an unseen presence moving across the center of the balcony and toward the exit on the left-hand side.

What I saw was clear as day: a tall, thin, black male figure seated in the middle of the balcony, maybe two or three rows back. Though details were vague, I instinctively knew he was probably in his 40s. At the loud crescendo of the sound effects, he seemed disturbed by the noise. Slowly, deliberately, he rose from his seat and walked toward the bright exit sign, disappearing like mist into the shadows before he entered the hallway. I was completely stunned.

I shared everything with Brady and the cast, describing the spirit in as much detail as I could. Of course, some shrugged it off as rubbish, but others—especially a few actors I suspected had psychic sensitivities of their own—embraced the story. Which isn’t surprising, as those few actors and I had already been exploring the theater’s hidden nooks and crannies, searching for spirits in its darkened corners. The Ghost Hunters fantasy.

The following morning, Brady passed the story along to the house manager. His reaction? Pure recognition. “Oh—so your actress saw one of the shadow people,” he said knowingly. He went on to describe these shadowy figures as regular visitors to the theater, confirming nearly every detail I’d shared. Hearing this from someone who had worked in the theater for years was electrifying. Most importantly, it was validating. It was the beginning of something much larger than me, far more mysterious and captivating than anything I could have imagined for myself. Energy was moving—but I was utterly unprepared.

For a while, everything seemed to be working in my favor. My gifts were evolving in ways that felt exciting rather than overwhelming. Intuition flowed more smoothly, like a language I was finally learning to speak with confidence. My career was solid, moving forward with purpose and momentum, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like a fully functioning adult. Bills were paid on time. My fridge had actual food in it. My emotions, while still intense, had found a rhythm I could live inside without drowning.

I had finally made peace with my decision to leave the program and pursue my career. The guilt softened. The what-ifs quieted. I could look back at that choice without flinching and say, I survived that. I had faced the first real test—walking away from expectation and choosing myself—and came out intact. But life has a way of refusing simplicity. Just when you start to believe you’ve cracked the code, it shifts the terrain beneath your feet.

It’s strange how time reshapes everything. When I look back now, my life seems to move in five-year cycles—giant internal shifts that arrive whether I invite them or not. Some lessons repeat, wearing different costumes. Others arrive brand new, sharp, and unfamiliar. Each cycle leaves its mark. And the next five years—those years—quietly formed one of the darkest chapters of my life.