Memoirs of a working medium: Part 3

I could tell you the stories. I could unpack the chaos, the absurdity, the moments that were equal parts reckless and heartbreaking. Maybe I’ll eventually grow the balls to do so. But there’s really only one honest way to summarize that entire stretch of time: I hated myself, and because of that, I refused to trust myself anymore. This led me to do stupid shit.

That distrust seeped into everything. I stopped listening to my body. I second-guessed every intuitive nudge. The inner voice that once guided me became something I argued with, something I silenced. My empathy—already strong—went through another brutal upgrade. It wasn’t insight anymore; it was overload.

Things may have played out differently if I were mindful of my surroundings. Instead, I found myself stuck in a job that drained me, surrounded by people whose energy felt sharp and hungry. Energy vampires. The kind who leave you feeling hollow, like someone ripped out your soul and frantically folded it into a piece of origami. The room always felt too loud or too quiet, and I went home each day carrying energy that wasn’t mine.

Meanwhile, the good people—the ones who felt warm, honest, and safe—seemed impossibly far away. Not because they disappeared, but because I had closed myself off from them. It was like I had drawn an invisible line around myself and decided isolation was safer than connection.

I grew bitter. Slowly at first, then all at once. The bitterness settled into my body like a residue—tight in my jaw, heavy in my gut, a constant weight of irritation I couldn’t shake. I became destructive in quiet, insidious ways. I burned bridges I didn’t believe I deserved to cross. I sabotaged moments of peace before they had a chance to settle in. I told myself I was being realistic when really, I was just exhausted and angry at myself for still hurting.

Eventually, that bitterness curdled into shame. Not the fleeting kind, but the deep, marrow-level shame that convinces you this is simply who you are now. That shame guided my choices more than I realized. It lowered my standards. It dissipated my boundaries. It placed me—again and again—in situations where I accepted treatment I never would have tolerated before. And I was okay with it. Or at least, I told myself I was.

There’s a specific numbness that comes with that kind of self-abandonment. Your body knows something is wrong, but your mind works overtime to rationalize it. You shrink. You dissociate. You tell yourself it’s not that bad, that you’re overreacting, that this is just how relationships work, how life works, how you work.

Looking back now, I can see it clearly: I wasn’t seeking pain—I was confirming a belief. I had decided, somewhere deep inside, that this was what I deserved. And once you believe that, abuse doesn’t always arrive as a shock. Sometimes it feels familiar. Predictable. Almost safe in its cruelty. I attribute this to a lot of the imposter syndrome I still experience to this day. Maybe it was just years of unresolved trauma. Whatever it was, I felt it. And it was not pleasant.

It often felt intentional. Like I was punishing myself. Like I believed suffering was proof of something—strength, resilience, worthiness. I kept choosing environments that mirrored how I felt inside: heavy, disconnected, cold. It took years to understand that this wasn’t endurance. It was survival layered on top of self-erasure. And it took even longer to forgive myself for mistaking the two.

The days blurred together, thick and slow, like moving through fog. I existed in survival mode, vibrating at the lowest frequency I’d ever known. I was disconnected from my intuition, from joy, from the version of myself who once felt curious and alive. The truth is this: when your energy depletes as a spiritual being, you don’t just lose clarity—you invite chaos. Anger creeps in. Darkness settles. Negative energy latches onto you and eventually infests the physical body. When you abandon yourself, you create space for everything that thrives in that absence.

And yet—darkness is never the whole story. Because with darkness comes contrast. And with contrast, the possibility of light. As the world quietly crept toward an unexpected global pandemic, something inside me began to shift. It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t feel hopeful at first. It felt like exhaustion. Like hitting a bottom so complete that there was nowhere left to go but inward. I didn’t know it then, but I was already crawling—slowly, painfully—out of hell. Back toward my body. Back toward my intuition. Back toward my soul’s purpose.

What I didn’t yet realize was that the real soul healing was just beginning—a deep, transformative journey that would reshape everything I thought I knew about myself and the unseen world. Slowly, like threads weaving into a tapestry, my experiences and emerging gifts began to coalesce into a practice rooted in purpose and power.

With the arrival of what I now refer to as my first major awakening, I finally caught sight of the light at the end of the tunnel. It didn’t arrive all at once, and it certainly didn’t arrive gently—but it arrived honestly. This marked the beginning of a season defined by growth, expansion, trust, and, eventually, love. Not the polished, spiritualized kind, but the kind that asks you to stay present when it would be easier to dissociate or disappear.

Between 2020 and 2025, I moved through what felt like a full five-year initiation. This was the era of shedding the bullshit—old identities, inherited beliefs, coping mechanisms, and narratives that had once protected me but were now suffocating me. I did the work in ways that were both deliberate and messy: therapy, spiritual practice, embodiment, grief, joy, rupture, repair. Healing refused to be linear. It came in volumes—sometimes soft, sometimes destabilizing—and I had to learn how to experience them without losing myself.

During this time, the spiritual tools that once overwhelmed me began to weave themselves into my body and everyday life. I earned my RYT-200 Yoga Teacher Certification, learning to inhabit my breath and physical form with intention rather than fear. Over the course of a year, I also became a Reiki Master Teacher, deepening my understanding of energy, boundaries, and ethical healing.

What once felt intrusive slowly became intelligible—something I could work with, rather than something working on me. I began teaching tarot classes and hosting meditations at local wellness centers, which helped me discover my strengths as a teacher and opened doors to even more opportunities. I was finally able to immerse myself in a healing community and find other souls who had similar experiences. Suddenly, everything seemed to coexist in harmony.

Eventually, practice turned into service. I received my first residency as a psychic reader and Reiki practitioner at a metaphysical shop in Old Town Lake Elsinore. It was there, in that liminal little pocket of time and space, that my work began to feel real. I learned how to hold others without abandoning myself. I learned discernment. I learned trust—not just in spirit, but in my own capacity to stay grounded while opening up.

I also learned very quickly about the dangers of this work—and the predatory, toxic environments it can create. I made the brutal discovery that some people enter this life with incredible gifts, but those gifts can be twisted, weaponized, or used to control others. As the baby of the group, the rookie walking into this world wide-eyed, I was like a walking target for the worst kinds of energy vampires. The old-timers of the spiritual and metaphysical communities who carried massive egos, more interested in wielding power than offering healing or guidance as practitioners. They weren’t subtle—many wanted to be cult leaders in disguise, and it showed in how they manipulated and controlled others under the guise of spiritual authority.

They came in every shape and form. The culty, new age alienesque priestesses who dripped with self-importance. The boundary-crossers who thought it was fine to invade strangers’ lives, reading aggressively without consent. The total jokers who claimed they could channel Egyptian deities or manifest miracles through sex magic, laughing off the potential trauma they caused. The “certification whores” who treat the spiritual world like a business venture—never investing the time to master their craft, but quick to hand out credentials to anyone willing to pay a pretty price. Who cares if it’s triple the price you should be paying for a Reiki Certification? $2,222 is an angel number! And then there were the predators in plain sight—the stereotypical, pervy creeps who saw healing spaces as hunting grounds for young, vulnerable souls.

The common thread? They all targeted those who were lost, broken, or desperate for answers, exploiting their pain and confusion for their own gain. Everything stemmed from a place of hierarchy and competition. So to put it bluntly, I’ve seen it all. I’ve witnessed the worst this work can offer. It’s heartbreaking, because I’ve also seen the absolute best. I’ve watched this work heal, uplift, and transform lives in ways nothing else can. But you learn fast: with the sweet comes the sour, and that sour can poison everything if you’re not careful. The remarkable discovery of this whole chapter was that my psychic bullshit detector was there to help me navigate who was in it for real and who was just in it for cheap tricks—to set boundaries and understand the role I had to play in this new world.

That first year of professional work was brutal in its lessons. It forced me to face the shadows head-on—the dark underbelly of metaphysical practice that no one talks about openly. But it also grounded me in a way nothing else could. It made me a more cautious, more ethical practitioner. It made me tougher. It made me a better person. And somewhere in the midst of all this unraveling and becoming, I met and married my husband—a fellow psychic, my soulmate, and overall best friend. Our partnership has been its own kind of magic: a grounded, expansive, and deeply healing union that supports the work, the chaos, and the joy.

My path deepened, morphing from something that once scared me into something I embraced. I learned to recognize the language of the universe—the subtle, sometimes painfully obvious patterns that thread through life like cosmic Morse code. What once felt confusing, isolating, or alarming slowly revealed itself as synchronicity.

I started to notice the spiritual signs gathering around me—the large white owl that aggressively visited me one night while I chain-smoked on my porch. Repeated numbers followed me everywhere. The songs that would suddenly play at the grocery store or echo through the mall, lodging themselves in my head and refusing to let go until a larger message rose into my awareness. These weren’t random moments or coincidences—they were intricate, intentional, undeniably magical breadcrumbs laid out for me to follow.

The years were marked by cycles of death and rebirth so frequent they stopped feeling symbolic and began to feel cellular. Each unraveling made room for something more honest. Each initiation stripped away another layer of performance. And after that titillating, exhausting, sacred phase of becoming, I found myself in San Diego—not as a reward, but as the next container.

This city is the current setting of my story—spooky, chaotic, deeply alive, and, I hope, quietly inspirational. Not because I’ve arrived, but because I’ve learned how to remain: rooted in my body, open in my heart, and willing to keep listening. I have the tools now, a little hard-won wisdom, a support team, and my dumb little panther—my black cat, Anubis—by my side. Like the Fool in the Major Arcana, I take the leap, trusting the universe will catch me. And if it doesn’t, it’ll make for one hell of a story.