Experiencer

I will never know what truly happened to my mother in her childhood. What I do know is that once she remembered, it unmade her. It annihilated her. She had always been prone to migraines and suffered from endometriosis, a condition that remains shockingly understudied. Sometimes I wonder if her womb was touched by something unearthly.

What I know for certain is that she became a lighthouse for the weird. Whatever happened to her made her dissociate completely. As a child, she held herself together, but once she faced her trauma, she became convinced she had multiple personalities. I remember a phone call around 1998, her voice desperate for me to understand. I could not. My mother was my mother. I did not see her as fractured bits.

Fifteen years after her untimely death, I finally spoke to a psychic about her. Until then, I was terrified and not ready. When I asked about my mom, the psychic said she was there holding a sign that read “dissociative.”

That made perfect sense. It was the new word in the DSM, and I felt relieved to have one. My mother had been dissociative, absent, emptied out, a shell of herself after confronting the weight of her trauma. That made perfect sense where multiple personalities simply did not.

No one knows which comes first, the trauma or the weirdness, but those who have experienced trauma seem to attract strange phenomena.

Of all the weird things I have lived through, many of the darkest ones happened near her. She was a portal. It took me some time to see the pattern, but once I did, it changed everything.

Some studies link experiences of alien or supernatural visitation with histories of abuse. I am not claiming that is what happened to my mother, but it is a possibility worth holding. In older times, succubi and similar entities were recognized as real dangers. Today, these experiences are rarely spoken of. Across time and cultures, humans have tried to name the night terrors that press on the chest, paralyze the body, and haunt the mind. Science calls it sleep paralysis. Psychology speaks of dissociation. Religion calls it possession.

It persists, but we have no language for it, especially for the intimate and the forbidden, the things we are told to keep silent. Every religion has words for this, from possession to haunting, visitation, and spirit. Yet logical science refuses to touch it, as if the secular world has collectively agreed to look away. In doing so, we leave countless people alone with their experiences, doubting their own minds, carrying mysteries that might have been healed if only they were allowed to be spoken.

My mother did not seek the weird. The weird sought her. Her trauma opened doors.

I will never know the full truth of what happened to my mother. Some memories are locked away, and some may have been filtered through layers of perception, imagination, or even forces I cannot name. It is possible that what she experienced had shadows that felt otherworldly, or that her mind wove symbols to make sense of a reality too painful to face directly.

And yet the mystery does not diminish the reality of her suffering. I can hold what I do know, the fear, the harm, and the ways it shaped her life and mine, without needing to fully explain it. In this space between knowing and unknowing, the human, the psychic, and the anomalous can coexist. Here, meaning emerges not from certainty but from presence, witness, and the courage to honor both trauma and wonder.

What else might lie in the spaces we cannot see? What truths are hidden in the silence of memory? What mysteries might we carry, waiting for recognition or release? What happens to a culture that refuses to name what it fears? What wisdom is lost when we deny the unseen? What healing waits in the stories we are too afraid to tell?