Evolution of a reluctant medium’s job description
I was a reluctant medium. It took me a long time to get on board with that word and past the image of a wild-haired lady wearing dark robes with tricks up the sleeves. I’m mainstream, see. I love sports and shopping and movies and girl-next-door stuff. So for full decades of my life, it was much easier not to mention anything about the voices no one else heard or the knowing that filled me in difficult situations. When I couldn’t turn from it anymore, I had to figure how to talk about it.
For a long time, I kept a toe in socially conscious land, calling myself “mystic,” “empath,” or “intuitive,” depending on what I thought the listener already believed — choosing each word to fit with their particular view. But I got a lot of muddled looks and kept having to resort to “You know … I’m a medium,” for it to sink in what we were actually talking about.
After all of that dabbling with vocabulary, it dawned on me that explaining to any viewpoint what it means to be a medium is part of my job. Not many people have gotten to touch and then embrace the evidence my clients and I see over and over. It isn’t in the mainstream to talk about the divine presence that is in all we are doing every day. The experience of communicating with that presence is magical every time, so of course it takes some work to finesse it into conversation.
Here’s the simple explanation I use now to start straight, no matter whom I tell: I have very strong extrasensory gifts that allow me to communicate with other souls, spirits, ghosts, whatever you call the non-physical forms of life. (And no matter how atheist or materialist you are, you do experience life beyond five physical senses.) Well I just experience those things very intensely. Even the nonphysical soul in animal and plant life and objects.
And the most important part, which I could enjoy as soon as I stopped hiding it: The information I pick up through my ability to connect this way to passed souls and others is valuable. For the clients I read, it sparks epiphanies. It changes the course of negative experiences. It repairs emotional rifts. It feels so, so good. And true. When you experience it for yourself, there are hardly words to convey its power.
You try making all of that sound normal at a party …