Getting my wisdom teeth pulled was one of my more traumatic experiences from childhood. Although I’ve mostly healed from what happened that day, there’s one part that sticks with me—a reminder that who I am is different from who people say I am.
After my mouth had been gutted by the dentist with minimal novocain, and he left 1-1/2 teeth in the crook of my jaw, my mom rushed me to an oral surgeon in the city to finish the job.
This time they put me under. I remember three things: the coldness of the room and the people in it, counting backward from 10 to 8, and the doctor’s hand between my thighs.
I woke up to someone telling me my dad would be taking me home. I’m not sure why, but my parents had traded places. In the car I told him about the doctor’s hand. I’m autistic, so there was little emotion in it, just a matter of fact tone telling him I’d been touched inappropriately. He went back inside and then returned to the car, saying, “I talked to the doctor. He said you have a vivid imagination. It never happened.”
Vivid imagination.
I stewed on that awhile. For years, in fact, I gaslit myself, believing I must be wrong about the doctor’s hand between my thighs, and probably too, the boy who felt me up while I slept. I just had a vivid imagination.
Until I started to talk about things on TikTok and people believed me.
For the first time, I believed myself. At 43 years old, I thought, “My imagination is vivid, but this isn’t that. This isn’t my imagination. This is very very real.” For the first time in my life, I began to feel confident in what I was experiencing. My husband had been angry with me for saying no to sex. I did experience rape. I had in fact developed C-PTSD from 20 years of sexual coercion and a lifetime of objectification.
Believing myself changed everything.
I finally accepted that the doctor had touched me inappropriately. I knew this because I remembered my grandfather stroking me there the same way a few years before. I knew what I had experienced. It was real and I was right.
Awakening
By the time I met Navy Guy (his name is Bryan), I had worked through all of it, everything from the past that I had been gaslit about, every truth I doubted, I knew confidently. And I had healed the codependence that made me depend on the truth of others. I was firm in my reality apart from their perception.
So when I began to awaken with him, I was sure of what was happening to me. Maybe not why it was happening, or what it meant, but I knew what I was seeing, hearing, and feeling was real. A month or so after we broke up, when I began having wild dreams, I was ready to explore what this all meant.
In one of the early dreams that kicked off my spiritual awakening, I had a vision of me as a little girl and her name was Melanie. I wrote about it a little at the time, but didn’t say much. I was still processing by putting it to poetry. The poem, Melanie’s Wish, tells the story of this little girl, about 8 years old, with a boy (I’ll come back to him later).
Melanie was magic, and in this dream, she made a wish that turned a cafeteria full of adults in the 90’s into children in the 50s. I didn’t know it yet, but I now believe this dream was pointing me to a part of my calling.
As my for you page on TikTok was showing me “break up content” like tarot card love readings and attachment style stuff, I also came across videos about limerence and autistic rumination. I bristled at all of it, none of it felt relevant to me, but I had a platform and an audience full of women going through the same things. Many of my followers were post-divorce dating, and some of them were going through a tough break up like I was. I wanted to learn about what they were going through so I could help them, because helping other people heal heals me.
So I stayed and listened to the tarot readers, the attachment theory creators, and the psychologists and autistic people talking about limerence and rumination.
Limerence is an experience in which a person becomes fixated on another person in a way that objectifies them romantically. It’s very similar to how people objectify someone sexually. They see this person as an object of affection without any real concern for who the person is and their needs and wants.
Rumination is a particular persistence of thought, dwelling on things, usually negative. This is especially common for autistic people to experience after a breakup, when we go over and over details of the breakup and the relationship, but it’s not inherently unproductive.
I experienced rumination during the 15 months I was separated from my ex-husband before the divorce was final. My entire platform is the result rumination, but I believe it was my intuition leading me toward a productive use of this ability. And I consider it an ability, not a disability.
A disability is considered so because it hinders us in some way, but it’s not rumination that hindered me. What had always stood in my way was the perception of those around me causing me to feel like I wasn’t allowed to think my thoughts. I had been told I was “overthinking” to which I said in a TikTok video once, “Am I really overthinking, or are you underthinking?”
Psychic Intuitive Storytelling
I believe there’s something else happening here that’s being mistaken for negative rumination and limerence, which is a more psychic intuitive tool we just need to learn how to use properly. Before awakening, I had natural patterns of deep thought that others called overthinking and thinking too much. Post-awakening, I discovered something else.
I didn’t get caught in a loop of repetitive thought because I was ruminating, I got caught because I didn’t know I was doing it and what to do about it. In the months following my breakup with Bryan, I became fully aware of it and figured it out.
Storytelling through poetry was the product of deep thought. I thought deeply about my connection with him even while I was in it. I was becoming aware of a lot of the things he was bringing to the surface in our time together, things I needed to work on healing in myself.
Melanie was a symbol of my inner child. When she cast her spell to change everyone into children, this was a sign pointing to the work I was just beginning to do in my content. I was healing my inner children (several at different stages) and helping my following do the same.
What people called limerence was not an obsession with a man, but an obsession with healing.
What people in the comments on TikTok called rumination was me thinking deeply about my own healing journey and how being with Bryan had affected me. So much about him mirrored me that I was able to unlock things about myself I might have taken another decade or two to discover without him.
What people called limerence was not an obsession with a man, but an obsession with healing. I was not hoping to get back together with him, though I did hope we could hang onto a friendship. I loved him and knew he needed for us to be apart in order to heal, and intuitively, I knew I needed it too.
Every other week for a couple of years, I continued to have revelations about my childhood, relationships with other men, and assorted pain points that made me who I am. When I talk about him on social media or write about him here, it’s not because I’m waiting for him to come back to me. I’m using stories about him to heal things in me, and to help others heal themselves by awakening them to parts of them that mirror us.
What makes this psychic? Storytelling comes naturally to me, as it does to a lot of other psychic intuitive people, but these stories aren’t just limerent ruminative thought. Many of these stories come through psychic visions, dreams, and knowings. And, again, post-awakening, there’s an awareness of it that isn’t present prior to an awakening.
I believe many people who experience this unique train of thought are experiencing psychic, intuitive thought. You can say subconscious thought, if that feels better. Wherever these ideas come from, there’s a shift when we become aware that it’s happening. Assuming it’s a vision, does a few things for me:
* I am fully aware that it’s not real, it’s just a story
* I retain an open curiosity, to find out WHY this story is coming to mind
* I then use the story to play detective and find a wound of mine (or someone else’s) that needs healing
* I work through the pain in the story and heal the wound—or help another do so—and the story fades
Remember I mentioned a particular boy in the dream with Melanie. The boy was Bryan. Well, not really him. It was him visually, his face, his beard, his smile. And as a boy, he looked the same as in the photos I’d seen of him as a boy. But I discovered later that he was there as a representation of a childhood friend I had lost.
When Bryan and I were together, there was a particular moment with him that was slightly embarrassing. We were in my bedroom coming down from the high of sex, getting dressed, when I was suddenly overcome with a childlike excitement and I got a big grin on my face. He tilted his head to say, “What is it,” and I sighed, “It’s like you’re my best friend.”
I was aghast at myself for being so vulnerable. What a ridiculous thing to say like that out of nowhere. I had successfully swept it under a rug when I was reading my poem about Melanie again in late May 2023. Bryan and I had a phone call in which we got spicy and in this sexual energy again, I recalled what I had said to him in my bedroom. I put that together with the story about the boy in the cafeteria with Melanie, and I knew. It wasn’t about Bryan—it was about Jeff.
Although I did absolutely feel like he was a great friend, and I still feel deeply for him, there was a deeper wound there that he was bringing to the surface. You can read more about Jeff in my post called Love Makes Life Listen from July that year.
Jeff had been a childhood friend who died and I never got to grieve him properly. The story about Melanie and the feeling of friendship with Bryan helped me access old feelings I’d forgotten about. I ended up writing a poem about Jeff to transmute that old hurt, and Bryan and I talked about it when we talked again in June. Because of that ruminating and storytelling, I was able to get at the real story about my friend I’d lost, and heal that old hurt. This in turn healed some of the hurt of losing my friend Bryan too.
If you’re experiencing some creative ideas during a painful time, don’t judge yourself for it. If someone accuses you of ruminating or being in limerence, don’t let their pathologizing define you. They don’t know you like you know you. Say that again.
They don’t know me like I know me.
Don’t let anyone else tell you who you are. Explore the stories. Take those rabbit trails, awakened. Keep a peripheral eye on what you know to be true and let the stories play out. See where they take you. Run through parallels in your past, moments that felt the same way, and see what you can discover. Use these stories as a map to find those old things to heal.
While you do that, use whatever creative gifts you have (even if you think it’s not that creative) to move that pain through you and make something new of it. Whether you’re a writer like me or a restorer of vintage cars like Bryan, channel it all into something beautiful you can feel proud of.
There’s far less damage in overthinking than in not allowing thoughts to exist, less pain in emotions themselves as in stuffing them away for a later time. The key is knowing yourself and believing yourself.
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You and Me (for Jeff)
I want to ride bikes with you
I want to do all the things that kids like us do.
