It’s been years since I’ve kept anything that’s like a journal. I used to blog — if you remember. But always inconsistently — and usually, only when something big or bad was happening. I’ve never been good at reliably updating something, unless I was getting paid to do it.

This is what makes me a good employee, but maybe not the best entrepreneur. My t-shirt business, Mfn Top, suffers from my meh-ness in life. I can barely update my Facebook page, let alone be expected to keep up with inventory and what not.

But I am hoping this will be different. Because while I may not be getting paid to upkeep this “journal”, there is something important here — more than just chronicling miscellaneous tidbits of my life that I want to share with others. No. I am here to write because there is something that I need to share with myself. And I don’t know any other way to do this.

The Beginning

I have so many stories in my head. I was always an imaginative child, so some of the stories in my head might just be that — things I’ve made up. And others… well, others are real. I am at the point where some of the stories that may have been made up at one point have become real to me, and vice versa. And so, as I write this, I want you to know that this is my reality as I know it.

And so when I say my mommy is magic, I want you to know that in my reality, this is real. My mother. Is. Magic. I don’t really know what kind or why. But she always has been. She has the ability to out-chant Buddhist monks and communicate with the dead and allow powerful beings to speak through her. She can influence happenings and has an intuition that is often extremely spot on.

And I am her daughter. And so, I am also magic.

What does that mean?

Well, I was told that before my mother had me, she’d be pregnant many times before. And many times before, she’d been forced to have abortion. And when I was conceived, Buddha came to her in a dream and told her to keep me. That she must keep me. And she did. And I feel like this is important — because why would the dream have pushed to ensure she kept me if not for some kind of special reason?

And when I was little, I used to speak to the spiritual statues my mother kept on her altar. Not just like, baby talk, but full blown conversations in Thai — the kind of Thai that is spoken by monks in the temple — the kind of Thai that I shouldn’t know.

And when I was young, I could see spirits, or ghosts, or whatever label you want to give those that live in the other worlds that exist alongside ours. Sometimes I played with them, not knowing the difference between these entities and my-world children. But more often, I was scared of them. Scared of silence, because this is when they would speak to me. Scared of the darkness, because this is when I could see them clearest.

And so, I tried my best to stop seeing. Stop hearing. And most of the time, I was successful. I had managed to more or less close out that world, ignore my gut, ignore the voices, and pretend that I was “normal.” Actually, I won’t lie. There’s no pretending I was ever normal. I had a childhood that was fraught with emotional torment for being too fat or too smart or too whatever — and I still battle the demons given to me on the playgrounds of my youth. But at least in terms of the spiritual stuff, aside from pretty much being the only non-Christian I knew, I didn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

This didn’t mean I didn’t still experience the “paranormal.” It just means that it became unpredictable when I did. And that I didn’t share that part of myself with very many, because I didn’t share it with myself.

Originally written June 10, 2017