i’ve come to understand that our psychic radars are like muscles; we have to use them. i’ve learned that a good way to exercise this muscle is to keep myself from too much outside stimulus & influence early in the day. in 2020, i started a practice of not looking at my phone for at least 1 hour after i woke up. between this & a 10 minute morning meditation ritual, what had once been a casual, cursory psychic awareness became laser sharp.
i’ve learned that for me, psychic information arrives as a bolt of lightning. a jolt of total knowing awareness. it takes a skilled eye & a quiet mind to catch it, but it’s never failed me… as long as i’ve created the correct conditions and indulged myself enough to listen.
remaining in this state for any amount of time in a “modern” world, a world of the internet of things, is a feat on its own.
this is a story of how i learned that to hone these gifts was necessary for my survival.
since i was a teen, i’ve had an awareness that i perceived & experienced the world on a different frequency than many people that i’ve met. just writing that sentence made me feel like a pompous asshole, but i trust you understand i don’t mean it that way.
i just have a heightened sensitivity to my surroundings & a knack for letting my brain get quiet just long enough for a small sliver of the cosmos to drop in.
by the way, i think we all have this ability. the only thing that’s special about my “gifts” is the fact that i’m committed to them. but it’s taken me a long time to get here.
sometime around my first big hormonal shifts (aka puberty), i had a few dreams that turned out to be premonitions. the first of which was utterly startling.
somewhere in the desert, on the second story of a building that was crumbling to the ground. it was pure chaos. clouds of smoke and dust everywhere, people jumping out of windows to avoid delaying the inevitable.
when i woke up, i felt a foreboding knowing awareness. i logged into compuserve (think AOL), and the first thing i saw on the home screen was a headline about a building that had just collapsed halfway across the world. i was stunned, and i’m sure i thought something along the lines of, that’s fucking weird.
that same year i dreamt that i was at the mall with my friends, Micah and Cait, and Cait’s mom called to say that she wouldn’t be able to pick us up because she’d been in a fender bender with another friend’s dad. a few months later, standing outside of Old Navy with Micah and Cait, she got that phone call. it was like deja vu, except i could actually pinpoint the origin of the sense of “this has happened before.” again, my overall feeling was that’s fucking weird.
i don’t spend much time ruminating over what could’ve been different if i had gotten a bit more curious, dug a little deeper into the mechanisms of honing this knack for tapping into the psychic flow of information that we’re all swimming in every day. but it is interesting to wonder…
fast forward several years, and my mom and i were at Marshall’s. as soon as we walked in, i was hit by a blinding pain in the center of my forehead. a sinus headache. it stopped me in my tracks.
i’m not quite sure why, but when i told my mom, she asked, “is it yours?”
i took a moment to get quiet and let the answer arrive. “no,” i said.
so she asked me to think of “whose” it could be. again, a quiet pause brought the answer.
“Jeremy.”
Jeremy was the name of a boyfriend who had dumped me quite cruelly over AIM the night before the last day (and finals!!) of my freshman year of high school. my mom asked if i felt neutral enough to send Jeremy a little love to ease the sinus headache for us both. i decided i could, and we moved on. the pain behind my eyes dulled a bit, but not entirely.
when we’d finished our shopping and arrived at the registers, an employee said, “ugh, this sinus headache is killing me!”
mom and i shot each other a knowing, curious look. when that person turned around, their name tag read “Jeremy.”
i’d forget these stories for a long time, but remembering them now is a great way to quell any self-doubt about my ability to receive information from unseen sources.
i really got serious about honing my psychic abilities when paranormal activity in my apartment reached untold heights.
in 2017, sometime around Samhain, i decided to try a cleansing ritual. armed with a smoke bundle and some ill-researched information from the interwebs, i swear to god i unwittingly opened a portal of sorts.
a few weeks later, one of my cats died. to be clear, he had thyroid issues and at approximately 12 years old, he was very old for a thyroid cat, so i’m not saying that he died because of the apartment. but i am saying that a layer of protection had been shed, and then gradually but suddenly, shit started to really get real.
it started as me thinking that i’d heard people talking about me in the basement (more on the basement later). i attributed this to an overactive imagination and the fact that as an only child, i spent a lot of time in my room trying to hear my mom and step-dad’s conversations. i don’t know if this rationale makes sense to anyone else, but it made sense to me.
after the disembodied voices arrived, things started to get a little weirder. my remaining cat, Melo, a suspected rag doll who my mom and i had always joked could see into other realms, started being affected. it started out with fleas that i brought home from work.
at the time, i worked as an operations manager at a contracting company that flipped foreclosed houses for banks. i could probably write an entire book about my time there and all of the strange and conflicting feelings and experiences that went along with it, but i digress.
part of my job entailed going on “field trips” with my boss to check up on our project managers & subcontractors. as you can imagine, there are all kinds of surprises in abandoned houses. that fall, we were working on a beautiful old home in Connecticut where a family of raccoons had decided to move in. hence, the fleas.
i got flea treatment from the vet. i spent weeks washing everything, spraying every single cloth surface with some “all natural” flea cleaner multiple times a day. at a certain point, i was satisfied that i had successfully won that battle. there were no more signs of flea dirt (ew), and for a while, Mel seemed to be scratching less.
how exciting! no more fleas! no more feeling dirty in my own home!
JUST KIDDING.
while i battled the fleas, the gossiping voices morphed into a sort of nasty narrator. sometimes it sounded like they were arguing about something i couldn’t quite figure out, but over time that faded and it just started sounded like muffled judgments from afar.
oh look she’s having leftovers again. and those dishes are still in the sink. she should really take that trash out, it’s disgusting.
it’s hard to describe exactly how i heard these critical narrators other than to say that while it felt like it was all in my head, it simultaneously sounded like it was coming from somewhere outside of me. but the longer it went on, the more this narrator nestled into the corners of my brain, and it started to feel like i couldn’t tell where it ended and i began. what’s worse is that all of the comments were about things that i would normally chastise myself for.
so i conquered the fleas, but now i had a new boss to battle. i tried to push what i was hearing away, combat the nasty narrator with kinder self-talk, and distract myself any way that i could. that worked for a while. working over 60 hours a week didn’t hurt. but then the moths came.
yes, moths.
i’ve just now realized that i haven’t painted a proper picture of this apartment for you. let’s backtrack a bit and set the scene.
i found it on craigslist during a time when i was desperate to leave a less than ideal living situation. set in the “center” of a very small town, it was a former nursing home. a long, one-story brick building with massive hallways. hallways with enough breadth for gurneys.
the walls were painted a sickly, jaundice sort of yellow, and save for one other tenant, i was the youngest person living there by about 20 years. sometimes when i’d go out at night i would hear one of my neighbors watching porn at an absolutely unacceptable volume. one time, while heading to my mailbox, i saw that same man’s entire ass. if only i had been psychic enough to know that was not the only time i would see a strange man’s ass in public, maybe i would’ve avoided the laundromat that day last summer.
but back to the apartment.
the building boasted massive, cold hallways, paint that was probably older than me, a pervy neighbor, and thick, cement walls.
my apartment itself was a decent sized 1-bedroom at around 800 SF, and my rent was only $850 a month, so who was i to complain about old paint and weird neighbors? i had a big living room with lots of sunlight, a postage stamp kitchen, and a bedroom that granted me beautiful views of the sunrise. plus, it had a bathtub, off-street parking, and it was right across the street from the laundromat. do you know how hard it is to find all of that for $850 a month, even 7 years ago?! well, you’re alive and reading this in 2023 (or beyond), so i imagine you do.
now that you have a clearer picture of the place, let’s talk about the moths!
when i first moved in, i noticed one or two from time to time, but i mostly left them alone, and they me. perhaps not everyone would be so cavalier about it, but i basically grew up in the woods and lived at a campground for 4 months at age 9, so i have a fairly high tolerance for the outside getting in. but in the fall of 2017, my window of tolerance was surpassed.
at some point, somehow, my entire kitchen became flooded with moths. and not just moths… but their larvae. it was horrible. there is no other way to describe it.
do you remember how i proudly declared, “no more feeling dirty in my own home!” well, that was officially out the window.
i tried everything—short of calling my landlord. i felt like i was unraveling at the seams, and i was terrified they would find no evidence of moths. i was routinely spraying every surface of my kitchen with diluted bleach. i still have a pair of socks that boast stained soles from walking on the kitchen floor while bleach dripped from the ceiling. come to think of it, i should probably get rid of those socks.
the moth invasion really sent me over the edge. i felt like i was living in an episode of the x-files. and right on time, the thrum of nasty narrators increased.
and then there was Melo. poor, sweet Melo, who would be sitting happily on my lap only to spring up and run away, ferociously digging at her neck. when i ran my hands over her, i felt scabs there. i thought the fleas were back, so i doubled down on the washing and the spraying. and i know you’re probably thinking, marta, why didn’t you just talk to your cat. haven’t you been doing talking to your for pets the better part of your life? and to that i would say, yes, but it’s hard to get quiet and listen when you’re in survival mode.
at that point, my entire life outside of work was spraying various chemicals, feeling terrified to step foot in my own kitchen, and being utterly distraught over the source of “the voices.” i felt like i was plummeting into certain darkness.
these feelings were exasperated by a few key points:
my long distance boyfriend at the time did NOT believe that i was hearing anything and insisted that i was losing my mind. (your guess as to why i didn’t dump him and instead moved to the other side of the country with him is as good as mine. but that is another story for another time.)
one of the few things that i know about my biological father is that he was probably psychic but also had no idea how to hone it and therefore was labeled “schizophrenic.” schizophrenia symptoms typically start in your teens, but can start in your late 20s and by that point their onset can be severe. i was terrified that “my genes had finally caught up with me.”
i had recently started talking Wellbutrin after a very serious spell of depression.
by now i think you’ve figured out that i was overall living out of alignment and quite off-balance. these things made me super susceptible to being taunted by unseen things that like to taunt. and boy, did this thing in my apartment like to taunt.
one night, near at my breaking point, i couldn’t take the voices anymore and yelled out in frustration, throwing my phone against the wall.
i later remembered that when i toured the apartment, the superintendent told me that the previous tenant had been an angry drunk and could often be heard yelling and throwing things. this was my first inkling that perhaps something else was at play.
i’m not sure if it was that night or another shortly thereafter, but eventually i’d had enough and i packed up Melo and some clothes and sought refuge at my mom’s house. by this time we were fast approaching the new year. when i arrived, we watched White Christmas. i called out of work the next day and tried to feel whole again.
at some point it was decided that i wouldn’t go back to the apartment—at least not right away—and slowly but surely my vision started to clear. Melo’s scratching fits stopped immediately, and her scabs were gone within a week. the voices stopped entirely. i remember spending the whole first day at my mom’s sitting quietly, anticipating the nasty narrator’s return, but it was just me in my head. finally.
it was this experience that reminded me that throughout my teens and early 20s, i would often hear random snippets of conversation that meant absolutely nothing to me. clairaudience. it happened most often in my bathroom, while blow drying my hair. knowing what i know now, it’s easy to see how the thrum of the blow dryer and the monotony of running a brush through my hair could induce a light trance.
so, i wasn’t plummeting into the void anymore. but i also wasn’t going back there.
i officially moved out at the end of February 2018, with heaps of help from family and friends, and everyone who helped agreed that the energy was weird and palpable. strangest of all, there was absolutely no sign of the moths. it was as if they never existed.
in the meantime, i had sought out a Reiki practitioner who was the relative of a family friend. she was a very specific type of white Reiki practitioner who was also very catholic. she explained that whatever was in that apartment taunting me, it was feeding off of my fear, and she told me to call on Archangel Michael whenever i entered the building. this is how i learned to ask for help from the spirit realm before shit hits the fan. it was our conversations that crystallized the idea that had been largely abstract up until that time: in order to survive, i would have to learn to consciously channel energy.
years later, watching The Outsider and reflecting on the similar themes of Twin Peaks regarding the way fear feeds monsters, i would think of this time in my life.
this Reiki practitioner also knew the area and told me that she had held a training in the other building on the property. during the training, two police officers who were so spooked by the energy there that they left the training. (cops doing Reiki??? to this day i’m still VERY skeptical about this, but it’s the story she told me!)
i also learned that while i had understood the building was a former nursing home, THE BASEMENT HAD BEEN A MORGUE.
I HAD BEEN LIVING ABOVE A MORGUE FOR THE BETTER PART OF TWO YEARS AND I HAD NO IDEA.
now, if i had known that do you think i would’ve fucked around and tried to do a mini internet exorcism-lite without better preparing myself? HELL NO. i would’ve done things very differently and probably would’ve learned a lot of lessons in a much more gentle way. but i’m heavily Saturn-influenced, so i guess sometimes i just gotta learn things the hard way.
once it was clear that i was leaving, things got weird even when i wasn’t at the apartment. i remember very clearly being “threatened,” with a car accident when leaving work one day. i brushed it off and called on my ancestors, determined not to let this thing best me. just a few minutes later, a car accident took place right in front of me. someone cut me off, and i was so irritated… and then i was the first car in the line of traffic that was not involved in the accident.
moving out was its own journey. it was a lot of prayer, and a lot of singing. my mom and i sought the knowledge of some other psychics and got some solid tips for how to balance the energy.
in the end, the entire experience was a crash course in fucking around and finding out and taking my psychic predisposition seriously.
it is also the main reason that i do the work that i do. without that experience, this little blog probably wouldn’t even exist.