People gravitate towards anger because it’s the most accessible and instant means of verifying that one can still feel, with fear/anxiety following as a close 2nd. Other feelings are more abstract and subject to interpretation, and can not help you verify whether or not you’re operating on auto-pilot.
People are either pushed or propelled through life. Some let external forces push them, some let inner forces chase them. Either way, you can experience both while being completely numb.
There’s something very unsettling to me about being still.
I am afraid of the dark, particularly in any room that features a mirror or open doors. I tried to confront that fear last night by turning off the lights of my bathroom. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, trying to focus on the fact I was in a safe place and that there were people in the house who would protect me, and that it’s rare for an entity to manifest itself in a physical enough form to hurt me. I panicked anyway.
When I was young, I would sleepwalk. Sometimes I would be in mid-conversation with someone, and slowly realize that I was sitting in the dark on the couch in front of the TV, and that there was no one there. Yet, I would feel like there was someone there. I would go to sleep every night with the covers over my head, even if it was hard to breathe, and be scared that I would wake up in the living room talking to people I could feel but couldn’t see. I finally stopped doing that in high school, though I would still sleepwalk out the front door sometimes, which was always so much less scary than those times I would wake up in the living room. It’s terrifying to wake up to find you’re not in the place you’re supposed to be, and you swear there’s someone else there in the dark with you.
Once when we were little, my brother and I were playing and I accidentally knocked him on the side of the head. He had been really bouncy and happy, but all of a sudden, his eyes just dulled and he slowly crawled into bed and went to sleep. I was scared because what happened with his eyes was weird. He had a seizure later that night, and I called 911 because my parents had gone out to dinner with friends. The paramedics came and asked me if his head had struck anything recently and I told them he had a history of seizures (which was true), but I knew I caused it. They carried him out of the room. I don’t remember how I got to the hospital. They put him in this bin and hooked him up to IV’s, and he was really pale and weak but he still laughed when I played with him, until the nurse came over and told us to be quiet. My parents came and they looked so scared. I told them I didn’t know what happened.
Do ever think back about something that happened in the past, and your heart beats faster, you start to sweat and you get terrified even though you know that at the end of the scene, things turn out okay, but when you’re reliving it, there’s a part of you that doesn’t believe it? Thinking about that night still scares me. It happened at the hotel by Disneyland. I hate Disneyland now, and I’ve never told anybody the reason why.
Reggie saw a ghost when he was younger, walking up the stairs of an old house in which a man had died. It scared him so much that he had trouble going to sleep in the dark, well into adulthood.
My baby cousin has been seeing things in their house, in the corners and high in the air. He gets scared and cries, and it’s disturbing his parents because they don’t see anything, yet my cousin will point and cower. He calls them “Bugs” and says they’re very large. They have taken him to eye specialists, neurologists, priests and spiritual gurus, etc., but no one can tell them anything. The priests just said that we share this world with things that are both good and very bad, so it is very important that we pray and stay connected and aligned to positive forces.
People don’t have to believe in ghosts, but the phenomenon of being haunted is indisputable. Whether it’s something you’ve seen, experienced, believed, done, thought…we carry these things with us the way we carry our shadows, and these are the things that visit us when our minds and beings are still. I wonder what else we would see, if we weren’t working so hard to stay numb, to focus on only the things that are in front of us or that we put in front of ourselves to keep us looking forward. I always look at people and wonder, what are the things that haunt you?