I learned very early how to become someone people wanted to be around.
I don't remember a moment when I consciously decided to do this. It happened gradually, through all the subtle ways a child learns what feels safe and what feels dangerous. Looking back now, I can see that my sensitivity, which was such a natural part of who I was, became something I used not to connect with the world, but to navigate it.
I’ve always been sensitive. Even as a child, I had a deep empathy for others and a tendency to find meaning and relationship in the natural world. I noticed things. I felt things. I was drawn to the unseen ways that everything seemed connected.
But because of the circumstances in which I grew up, that sensitivity became tangled up with my need to belong. My young mind interpreted feeling deeply and perceiving differently as something that could threaten my place with others. Somewhere along the way, I learned that expressing certain parts of myself could lead to rejection or abandonment.
And for a child who depends on others for safety and care, the absence of a felt sense of belonging can feel like a threat to survival.
So I adapted.
I became a chameleon.
The sensitivity that could have helped me experience my own authenticity became the tool I used to anticipate what others needed from me. I learned how to read the room, make people comfortable, and shape myself into someone I believed would be easier to love.
The irony is that this strategy, created in the name of connection, ultimately kept me disconnected. When you're constantly adjusting yourself into the person you think others will accept, it becomes difficult for anyone to truly know you. Over time, I wasn't only keeping other people at arm's length; I was keeping myself there too.
Trust became difficult.
Trust in myself. Trust in others. Trust in life.
As I’ve stepped more deeply into energy work, Reiki, and shamanic practice, I’ve started to see this pattern differently. I don't think I ever lost my sensitivity. I think I spent a lifetime learning how to override it.
For many years, I was fascinated by intuition, spirit communication, dreams, and the unseen aspects of life. Some part of me was always curious.
And yet, another part immediately responded:
Not me.
Not because the curiosity wasn't there.
Because I believed that allowing myself to be open to these things could cost me my relationships. The fear was never really about whether these experiences were possible. It was about what accepting them might mean about who I was.
Then life began offering experiences that my old framework couldn't easily explain.
The first time I journeyed to meet a spirit guide, I expected doubt and uncertainty. Instead, the experience felt surprisingly natural. A guide appeared almost immediately.
What surprised me most was that it challenged a belief I'd carried for so long: that this wasn't something available to me.
Recently, I was preparing to offer a shamanic Reiki absentee healing for a dear friend who has ongoing issues with her eyes. As we spoke and agreed to enter into that healing relationship together, something unexpected happened.
My own vision changed.
My left eye began experiencing a strange distortion. I saw shimmering patterns, spots, and a prism-like effect that had never happened to me before. My mind immediately searched for an explanation, but underneath the questions was a deeper knowing:
This wasn't mine.
I can't explain how I knew that. I simply did.
After our conversation ended, I cleared the energy in my space and sat at my altar for a few minutes. As quickly as it appeared, the visual disturbance disappeared. My vision returned completely to normal, and it has not happened again.
Years ago, I would have dismissed an experience like that before allowing myself to be curious about it. My mind would have found a way to explain it away.
And I don't think that was because my mind was trying to stop me; I think it was trying to protect me.
The beliefs we form in order to survive shape our instincts and influence what we allow ourselves to receive.
Even now, that old fear still arises at times, but something is different...
Trust, for me, is not about abandoning discernment or rejecting the logical mind in order to embrace the unseen. Both can exist together.
Maybe that is the deeper healing.
Not becoming someone new or gaining something I never had, but learning to trust the parts of myself I spent a lifetime trying to hide.