After my mother passed unexpectedly, I heard her voice loud and clear in my heart, as if she urgently needed to share things with me.
I remember feeling so raw, needing to share what I heard from her with anyone who would listen.
Looking back, I see that sharing, as opposed to keeping things to myself (like I usually did) was helping me feel so much less alone in my grief.
In fact, I found it very healing—both hearing her voice and sharing what I heard.
Then, a well-intentioned relative called. She said, “I’m very concerned. You say you’ve been hearing your mother’s voice telling you specific things. You do realize hearing voices runs in your family, don’t you?”
I was shocked, and then felt all the healing and peace I’d been cultivating drain from my being.
And then I felt angry. “I appreciate your concern,” I said. “But I never said I thought for sure it was my mother. I was just open to the possibility that it could be.”
“Well,” she said. “It’s just not normal to hear voices. I’m concerned. I’m just telling you my thoughts.”
At that moment, I realized why so many people prefer to keep their least “normal” thoughts to themselves. It’s safer that way.
Bc there I was—not reaching out for help, not suffering with voices in my head. Instead, I was experiencing something new, something spiritually profound—still acknowledging it could be my imagination, but open to the possibility that there could be a place beyond this place, where the spirit can still communicate with loved ones—and yet, this person felt it was her duty, not to validate my experience, but to let me know I might be having a mental health crisis.
It was hard for someone like me, who was wired for approval, not to take her concern to heart. And I felt anxious, wondering if she was right—if maybe there was something wrong with me.
But then I remembered: I grew up around people who held onto their ideas of “normalcy” as if it were their religion.
I had been pathologized my entire life for being different. I had people “concerned” about me, again and again, in the midst of some of my most deeply profound and beautiful moments.
So I reminded myself what was true for me: that I actually felt ok—that there was nothing wrong with me at all. I was raw, grieving, and trying to be open.
And I also reminded myself what was also true: that this person wasn’t purposely trying to ruin my profound moment. In her mind, she might have been trying to be helpful and caring in the only way she knew how—by trying to steer me back into the fold of precious normalcy.
And I think that’s what a lot of people protect: their experience of normalcy. Bc that’s what’s safe to them. And they offer their standards of normalcy and safety to those they feel might be straying too far, not to hurt them, but to save them.
But without getting into someone else’s world to understand where they’re coming from, you can’t save anyone. You can only attempt to indoctrinate them into what you believe is real. And the consequence of this is that the person may begin to doubt themselves and lose what’s real for them.
My poor mother—she actually did hear voices that were horrible and scary to her, and her own family banished her with their oppressive diagnoses instead of cherishing the parts of her that were beautiful, funny and brilliant, and letting her know that all that other confusing stuff didn’t detract from who she was. It was just stuff that needed to be sorted out, reframed, and given lots of compassion and support.
Every time my mother took the bus to wherever I was after she’d lost her job and her home, my grandmother would call me and say, “Get rid of her. She’s sick, and there’s nothing you or anyone else without a prescription pad can do.”
This was the person who raised my unique mother.
Thank goodness my mother was strong enough to burn so many bridges that led to so many toxic places. Because in her own space, without all those toxic voices being re-internalized again and again, she began to heal.
I have learned that people who keep themselves safe from realities other than their own, often have a smaller aperture of awareness. And though they don’t mean to do harm, the choices they make from their smaller field of vision can sometimes be very, very harmful.
Their need to protect themselves not only keeps them from developing a deeper relationship with who they are underneath their behavior, it keeps them from developing deeper, more meaningful relationships with others.
After this experience, I made a choice to shift away from needing other people’s agreement and to instead establish new boundaries. Boundaries that honored what was sacred to me through my own perspective, instead of feeling I owed any allegiances to the perspective of others.
Thankfully, I still hear my dear mother’s voice, along with the voice of wisdom from my heart that I already heard before my mother even passed.
And though I’m open to hearing and valuing and even internalizing the voices of other people’s perspectives, I wouldn’t trade my own for anything.
So if you’re reading this, and you’ve been pathologized for being different and for sharing your differences, fear not. Who you are is a gift.
What’s sacred to you won’t be understood by everyone. But instead of laboring, and trying so hard to be understood by people who truly aren’t in a position to understand you, spend that energy on just being you. On making sure your words represent what’s most meaningful and beautiful and funny to you. So that the people who are in a position to understand you, will hear you, and they’ll be able to find you and connect with you.
-JLK
