10/22/2026
I (Chloë) spent years trying to silence the very thing that was guiding me.
When I was a little girl, I used to lie in bed at night and stare at the tiny glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to my bedroom ceiling.
You know the ones. Those little plastic stickers that absorbed the light during the day and glowed a faint, greenish yellow when the room went dark.
I'd lie there, looking up at my own miniature universe, wondering about the actual universe beyond my bedroom walls.
Why are we here?
Where did we come from?
What happens when we die?
What's the point of being alive?
And perhaps the question that lived most persistently in my little heart: Why am I here?
I was a child asking enormous questions, staring at a ceiling covered in plastic stars, convinced that there was something much bigger going on than the world I could see.
I knew, somewhere deep inside myself, that there were other realms, other dimensions, other ways of experiencing consciousness. I had a sense that I was something far more expansive than this little human body lying in bed.
And I was fortunate enough to have a healer as a mother and practice from a very young age that gave me opportunities to explore those possibilities.
I had extraordinary visions, beautiful journeys into other dimensions and experiences that felt so expansive and alive that I could hardly find words for them.
I could feel connected to something vast, mysterious, and profoundly loving.
And yet, I had absolutely no idea how to bring any of that wisdom into the actual circumstances of my life.
Because outside those beautiful mystical experiences, things were often really freaking hard.
When you're a child, you don't have much context for the life you're living.
You know your family, the house you live in (if you’re fortunate enough to have one) and the sounds that come through the walls.
And you know the familiar ways the people around you move through the world.
You assume, more or less, that this is what life is like.
I didn't know that violence wasn't a regular feature of everyone's household.
I didn't know that other families weren't living with a constant undercurrent of financial panic, where money was something to worry about, fight about, and never quite have enough of.
I didn't know that other little girls weren't also navigating sexual abuse, trying to understand experiences that no child should ever have to make sense of.
And here's something that makes all of this so much more complicated.
There was also an extraordinary amount of love in my home.
There were cuddles, tenderness, affection, laughter, and moments of feeling deeply cared for. I knew what it felt like to be held, to be loved, to experience warmth and closeness with my family.
And all of those things existed alongside the fear, the volatility, and the experiences I didn't yet know how to understand.
I think that's part of what made it all so confusing.
How do you make sense of a home where you can feel so deeply loved and also so frightened?
How do you reconcile the tenderness of being held with the sound of screaming coming through the walls?
As a child, I didn't know there was anything to reconcile.
This was simply my life.
And while I was having extraordinary spiritual experiences, I was also a little girl whose nervous system was trying to make sense of a world that could feel profoundly unpredictable.
I can still imagine that strange distance between the two realities.
One moment, I could be contemplating a vision I had had of a beautiful waterfall, with rainbows and hummingbirds, with the sound of howler monkies, and sunbeams cutting through the pristinely clear turquoise water.
And then I'd be back in my house, with my parents behind a closed bedroom door, screaming at each other.
What was I supposed to do with all that spiritual wisdom then?
How was knowing that I was a body and a Soul supposed to help me when I could hear the rage coming through the walls?
How was I supposed to trust some profound inner knowing when the world immediately around me felt so unpredictable?
I didn't know.
And as I grew older, the gap between those two worlds only became more confusing.
When I finally got my driver's license, I remember counting the change I had to figure out how much gas I could put in the car.
There I was, a young woman who believed in the infinite possibilities of the universe, trying to determine how many miles a handful of coins could get me.
I knew how to have mystical experiences.
I had absolutely no idea how to trust myself in the ordinary, messy, frightening, practical business of being human.
And oh, how desperately I wanted to.
And what happened next changed the entire trajectory of my life.
I wrote about that journey in my newest Substack essay, I spent years trying to silence the very thing that was guiding me.
It's one of the most personal pieces I've shared, and I'd love for you to read the rest.
Because I wonder how many of us are trying to silence the very parts of ourselves that might have something important to say.
What if your Soul has been speaking to you all along?
💛 Read the full story by clicking the link to it in the comments below!
