Kumbaya Everybody

[Chief1C]

I can't bring myself to write a reply. I could probably write a novel, even pre-EMS. I'm one of those quiet people that have a lot held in.

[medic82942003]

IE dont take my blogging personnel.

Be safe. I dont care if you insult me, just pay me on time.

[Eydawn]

Sorry, cos, I missed this thread earlier. I'll try to revive it for you.

Where to start? There are many stories that have contributed their share in defining who I am. It's a really long story, even though I'm only 23!

First of all, I was home-schooled prior to high school. This contributed greatly to my intellectual capabilities, as I was able to move forward at the pace that best suited me. My mother was a demanding and exacting teacher with very high standards, and public school only became an option when my mother realized that she couldn't teach herself calculus from an answer manual and thereby couldn't help teach it to me. I entered high school at the age of 13. (This is the short version. PM me if you want to know more about my earlier life.)

Let me tell you something. Home-schooling didn't do a lot for my social development. While I realize that I am who I am because I was the odd-duck with a strong sense of self and simultaneous meandering ignorance with regard to mainstream social interaction, I would not repeat the experience. It took me several years to learn all of the subtleties of social interaction that most people acquire via osmosis. I still miss out on certain things, but I have learned to identify where my areas of weakness are.

I also grew up as one of the only white girls in the middle of the ghetto. I lived next door to a liquor store, across the street from an inner city high school, with a public bus stop in front of my house. Literally, I have picked up bullets from inside my front yard and inside my house. I developed a very strong sense of situational awareness and body language- I had to. If you didn't know how to read a group conflict, you didn't know when to duck and run for cover. The 4th of July and New Year's Eve are occasions to hide in the innermost room of the house, sitting on the floor, hoping to avoid stray gunfire. I've known how to handle a handgun since the age of 8, in case I ever needed to defend myself. I wouldn't exist if my mother hadn't had a Colt 45 when she was 8 months pregnant... but that's another story.

High school. This is where I developed premonitions. I won't go into detail here, as I think I have in other threads, but suffice it to say that having to tell your principal that you had a recurrent dream about a bomb threat on the morning that it actually happens is not the greatest of experiences...

High school is also where my love of medicine developed. I became a member of the Boy Scouts of America through their Venturing program, and attained my First Responder with my crew. I began providing support at a variety of scouting events, and began to love medicine for all of its complexities. I was fortunate to have wonderful mentors, some closer to my age than others, who really taught me a lot about life. One of the hardest decisions I ever made was to leave my crew behind so I could attend college in Michigan for nearly 3 years.

College. I would have to say that one of the hardest experiences in college was directly related to my experience with premonitions. I sat here and argued with myself for a few hours as to whether or not I really wanted to dive into this story again; I wrote about it in my creative non-fiction class, and I still struggle with it. This is something that will never leave me. I think I will just copy and paste what I wrote, as I think it will be easier than trying to re-tell the story. It also explains the premonitions in a way that I think is a lot more accessible than trying to explain it all over again.

‘Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast; Is that portentous phrase, "I told you so."’

-George Gordon, Lord Byron

Maybe for you it starts differently than it does for me—I can only hope so, for your sake. Maybe you are physically catapulted, in your mind, into that nebulous other dimension that we are all able to taste occasionally—whether it be through a touch of Déjà vu or a simple feeling of having been somewhere before, even though you know you haven’t. For me, it isn’t a clean break like that. Sometimes it’s almost like double vision, like blacking out with sound super-imposing itself in my perception over other, real sounds from the world around me. The cacophony is raucous, tinny, almost like driving full speed through a tunnel with your windows open and stereo blaring, echoes and sound-waves struggling to catch up with your belabored eardrums and never being quite sure which sound is which—which is real, there for others around you to hear, and which is coming through from somewhere else. Do you know where it comes from? Or what it really is? After all this time, I can’t answer this question. Maybe you will find the answer.

Do your eyes water like mine do, causeless tears from nowhere streaming down your face? Do you get that tingly electric hair-on-the-back -of-your-neck-raised feeling that spreads outward in waves across your body from the bump that is your first thoracic vertebrae, poking out where your neck and the rest of your spine meet? Does that feeling wash over your entire conscious experience in a singular moment of now that absorbs all of your energy and focus? I hope it is gentler for you than it is for me—I hope your entry into these snippets of possible future is sweeter than mine, if it happens to you at all. Maybe one of you will see something familiar in the experiences I have to offer here. Most of you will probably think I’m crazy. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.

I used to think I was alone, but as I have grown and loved and lived I have discovered others. Here and there throughout my life I have found them—the brother of a friend here, a passing acquaintance there, my future husband, and we have been so delighted to not be alone that we have shared bits of the intensity that is not-yet-come Déjà vu. But we do not always share the vulnerability and the guilt of the car wreck we heard before it happened, or the conversation we could have spoken in unison, verbatim, with the people who entered the room right after we did. I seldom share the more frightening, and thankfully rare visions that have shaken me with others. But I will share some of them with you, in case you struggle with a similar guilt, that we may eventually learn together to let go.

The first premonitions that I can remember started in high school, when I was fourteen. One was particularly frightening, and it began as a series of dreams. The first night, I dreamt that I stood on the fourth floor of my high school. In the dream, I watched a man, face hidden in darkness, pour gasoline on the floors. He went running with the bright red can turned upside down, the splashing liquid spreading quickly across the marbled surface. I followed him, only to wake up just as he pulled a single match out of his pocket. Having been terrified of fire ever since I was a small girl, the dream disturbed me.

**

Did I tell you why I’m afraid of fire? Come with me. My mother is at the bottom of the stairs, calling to me. I am in the bathtub. She yells something about fire. Frantic, running, naked and wet, I am scrambling for my clothes… running down the stairs and outside… and the fire is not ours. My neighbor’s house is on fire, and the children are climbing out of the second story window onto the porch

roof. Smoke is pouring from the windows behind them, blackening their skin. Can you smell it? I can still smell the bitter smoke.

**

The dream repeated itself, except this time I stayed asleep long enough to watch the match flare and hit the floor, creating an unearthly incendiary glow immediately hidden behind an acrid black cloud. The third night, instead of gasoline, I watched this same shadowed figure place something I knew to be a bomb into a cardboard box even though I couldn’t clearly see what the object was. He hastily shoved it underneath a tiny wrought-iron staircase that gave access to the roof. As he turned to move away from what he had done, I watched him throw a crumpled piece of paper into the box. The dreams seemed bizarre to me, but it was not the first time I had experienced a recurrent dream, so I paid it little mind after waking. Many times growing up I had dreamed the same dream several nights in a row. Some of the more embarrassing ones involved the classic hero-princess in distress motif in various thirteen-year old kid variations, with my current crush featured as the savior. This dream seemed odd, but felt no different to me than any other dream.

**

Come to school with me. It is the morning after the last dream. Do you see what I see? There are cop cars surrounding the school. Lights flashing, they have blocked every vehicular access to the building. There are fire trucks parked out front, but the men are wandering outside the building without their jackets on. Walk with me around to the back where everyone seems to be and we can find out what’s going on. There’s Ms. Hinz… we can ask her what happened. “Bomb threat called in to the school.” Is she serious? She can’t be serious. I can barely breathe for a few seconds, fearing to say anything about what I might know in case they think I’ve done it, or worse, ridicule me for being childish. Most school administrators are paranoid because of what happened at Columbine, and anyone who seems to be involved with something unusual is automatically suspect. I am afraid, because it was just a dream and this shouldn’t be happening. Dreams aren’t real. Dreams don’t work like this. Reality doesn’t work like this. Cold chills and nerves shaking my frame, I tell Ms. Hinz about the dreams, prefacing it with “you know, this is going to sound really crazy. But on the off chance that it means something…” Instead of condemning me, or outright dismissing me as crazy (both sensible options as far as I was concerned) she brings me to the school administrators, to tell them what I have seen.

**

Later, they would call me into the office after the building had been searched, to tell me that there had indeed been a box where I had seen one placed in my dream, and there had been a crumpled note in it from the person who had called in the bomb threat. I think they may have put me on the watch list after that, but I never did anything to rouse their suspicions. Fortunately, I was never forced to seek out psychological help. After this day, I started to wonder if something was wrong with me. Normal people didn’t dream about things before they happened, and while I had heard about people who claimed to be pre-cognitive or psychic, they always struck me in their TV interviews as being a few pickles short of a barrel. The last thing I wanted was to lose my sanity or be lumped into an even weirder category than I already inhabited in the minds of my peers and teachers. I tried to pass it off in my own mind as mere coincidence—but too many things kept happening that I couldn’t explain away.

The premonitions began to seep over into waking moments. One minute I’d be sitting in class, looking at the clock and wondering why it was a half hour fast… the next, I’d be blinking furiously, trying to clear tears from my eyes as the clock reset itself to the proper time. This wouldn’t seem too weird, except I would hear the fire alarm go off as the clock hit the time I had first seen as I came into the classroom, and my spine would tingle. I began to hear car accidents before they happened. I’d see and hear small things happen around me, hear conversations in my head that wouldn’t actually happen until after lunch, know what was wrong at home before I got there… after a certain frequency, chance metamorphoses into something that cannot easily be dismissed as insignificant. The dreams became fewer and further between, but the waking moments increased in frequency. Sometimes, it felt like living two lives— one life in the present, and one in the future. It was terrifying and difficult to explain.

Eventually, I learned to accept that the premonitions happened, as many of them, although not all, came to pass in front of me. Once I got to that point, I began to lose some of my fear. Most of them were fairly mundane, so the shock began to wear off slightly, even though the physical reaction remained the same. As a young woman navigating my development as a person, I simply tried to accept it as a part of myself. At the time, I had begun to develop a spiritual understanding of the world, so I accepted the premonitions as part of my religious heritage and began to wonder if God might have some plan for me. After all, weren’t there prophets in the Bible? Being given a foretaste of the future wasn’t completely unheard of, although it is not commonplace or widely accepted in our science-obsessed modern society. I couldn’t rationalize the premonitions without including my newly discovered religious beliefs. Simply being a freak of nature seemed too cold and less appealing than accepting myself as one of God’s different children, even as I researched to the extent of my ability to find an answer for why this was happening to me, to see if it could be explained scientifically.

I learned very quickly not to share this part of myself with many people. Most I dared to share it with either dismissed it as another facet of my already weird, geeky persona, or attributed it to an overactive imagination. Since I was already viewed as enough of a freak in high school, the nerdy teacher’s pet with awkward social skills and coke-bottle glasses, I suppressed it and hid it from nearly everyone, only bringing it up when I felt it to be absolutely necessary. I hid it from my parents, not wanting to worry them.

I graduated high school, still hiding inside the awkward shell, still searching for answers. I followed my first love to college, spending a delightful three days in a road trip to Michigan with him and both of our mothers. Both of us seemed to make friends quickly there, in the dorm; it was different from anything we’d ever experienced before. As we began to settle into a new life there, he began to acclimate to the humidity of Western Michigan—I found it much more difficult. The humidity and mold count exacerbated my asthma. And I discovered something new about my talent; it seemed that the more I had to use my rescue inhaler to combat the chest tightness, and the more caffeine I ingested the more frequent and pronounced the visions became. Since I was nearly always ill at that point from the change in climate and found myself caught in the cycle of college procrastination and late nights, my consumption of albuterol and coffee skyrocketed, sending my dreams and waking moments into places I could never have anticipated.

Occasionally, the things I would see would scare me, but most of the time I managed to let it fade into the background, since I could never tell with accuracy which dreams were poised to come true. I began to slowly tell certain people about my dreams and visions and since many people were engaged in their own adventure to find the self, my idiosyncrasy seemed less threatening. Even so, some of the visions would shake me. I could never quite get used to the sudden violence of accidents, or waking in a cold sweat at having seen my friends be hurt in some way. I rarely told someone that I had seen something about them—even though people were more accepting of the fact that I had premonitions, nobody liked hearing about ones that they were involved in. It seemed to be a natural fear, to me, so I made sure that I was careful about who I talked to. For months, this remained the status quo. Bouncing from illness to illness and surviving at the mercy of a metered dose inhaler, I tried to maintain focus on my class work and the friends I had made.

**

The status quo never lasts for long, does it? I guess we should go back to the day that will haunt me for as long as I can foresee… I owe it to him to let the story be told. Come with me. Let me show you my dorm, and what life was like for me back then. I lived in a dormitory that is segmented by gender; the girls’ wing that I live in is on the second floor of this brick and cinder-block structure. Directly beneath is the guys’ wing—full of jocks, mostly, with subwoofers that can vibrate nickels across my linoleum floor when they get frisky on the weekends. It’s pretty interesting, walking through their hallway to get to the stairwell; they have an interesting idea of what appropriate conversation should be like. I know most of the guys in this hall to some degree. There’s Tazar, the interminably sweet and terminally stupid drunk, and his Halo buddies—Alex, Eric, and the others. Often, the game of the day involves innocent passers-by avoiding the barrage of Airsoft pellets that click and bounce between their rooms. Sometimes there’s foul language as someone catches a pellet in a particularly sensitive area, and then the perpetrator gets chased out into the snow. And then there is Brandon.

**

Even when I can’t remember Brandon’s face, I can still see his smile, and the guitar perched on his knee.

**

Brandon loves his music, and the love he pours into playing his guitar fills our dormitory with a feeling that speaks to each of us in some way. Most of his close friends live up on the third floor, in the mixed wing. He is always smiling, laughing, teasing everyone. He is quieter than the other boys in his hall. He always has his door open, always ready to chat with whoever stops by.

**

I still regret that I didn’t see the sadness in his eyes.

**

I am waking in a cold sweat in the hot, cloistered dark, having watched one of the boys from the hall below me commit suicide. The next night, and the next, I wake again, watching each one of them hang himself, swallow pills and vodka, slash wrists into a red waterfall, lie down with a plastic bag balaclava. I am terrified, shaken…. I don’t have anything specific enough to go on, since the dreams haven’t focused on the same person every time. The memories of rejection and ridicule from high school prevent me from just walking down at three in the morning to wake everyone up and try to figure out who is so desperately alone. I am afraid to go down and speak to every guy in the hall, to ask them how they’re feeling or if they’ve been having problems lately. I am weak, and afraid of re-awakening that ridicule. Instead of confronting it, I pretend that I have seen and heard nothing. I try to convince myself that it is a fleeting and morbid fascination, with no basis in reality. Do I seem cowardly to you? When I go back to this place, I often feel ashamed. I feel ashamed, because I was wrong— and he paid the price because of my cowardice.

It is February 9th, 2005. Dance practice has just ended, and it is time to go back to shower and change. Walk with me out into the cold evening towards my dorm— something feels different. Something doesn’t feel right. Look—there in the red square, next to the fountain—there is a police cruiser. I feel like we should walk faster. There’s the dorm, surrounded by police cars, our own campus security, and a few emergency response vehicles. Can you see my knees begin to shake with more than fatigue? Can you see the fear in my eyes as I fervently pray that my dreams are not involved with whatever is happening inside? We push the door open and stumble inside, blinded by cold. Turn with me to go down the guys’ hall—but the grim-faced security guard is pushing us back, telling me that we can’t go down that way. Look at the faces around us- do you know what their expressions mean? I do. I know what this means. I can’t believe this is happening. This can’t be real. Please, don’t let this be real. Not this time.

In a panic, I leave the building, overwhelmed and unable to bear knowing who is dead. Who I have failed. Can you keep up with me? We are walking around the outside of the dorm, aimlessly. Who is that standing there, with his cell phone, frozen? It looks like Brandon’s old roommate, Quinn. I should introduce you to Quinn—always the first with a joke, always laughing, and never overly serious, Quinn is the master of humor. He is a manly man, interested in beer, sports, women, and rough-housing. Barely a day goes by without Quinn haranguing someone, gleefully chanting “Oh… he LOVES the cock! Yep. That’s our boy. Loves the cock!” in mock homophobia. Why is he standing here? I know it’s him, because I can see his leather jacket reflecting the walkway lamps.

“Quinn?” I ask, trying to suppress my tears. “What’s going on?”

Quinn answers in a voice I’ve never heard from him before. He is crying. Quinn is crying, tears dripping down his face from behind his glasses, his ball-cap almost ready to fall off the back of his head.

“I think my roommate from last year just killed himself.” His voice breaks. “They… they’re telling me that Brandon is dead.”

I think my knees are giving out. I can feel Quinn grabbing me, our friend Kyle coming up from somewhere, grabbing my other arm. I can feel them helping me inside, into a chair. At some point, between sobs, between waves of guilt, I tell them.

**

There is no way to really describe the guilt that grabbed me that night. Shame, self-loathing, regret… none of these words says enough.. If I was meant to have some forewarning, why wouldn’t I have been able to see enough to save him? Why would a just God give me a gift that I couldn’t use? I was angry, and worse, I felt like I had failed Brandon and everyone who loved him. In that moment of extreme vulnerability, I told Quinn about my dreams—about the premonitions I’d had before, and the ones I had about someone committing suicide on Brandon’s floor. I was sure he would reject me. Instead, at Brandon’s open-microphone memorial in the chapel the next evening, Quinn sat next to me and put his arm around me. We cried together. To this day I am not completely sure how Quinn felt when I told him, since Quinn is fairly reticent with emotion. Quinn avoids the tough conversations, hiding behind humor and the macho façade. I know he believed me, and I don’t think he blamed me. I grieve for him more than anyone. I could have spared him that pain… I could have protected him, too. I could have. I should have. But fear made me weak, and my weakness hurt all of us.

It took me a long time to begin to let go of the guilt. The college put up a lamp-post in front of our student center in Brandon’s memory, with his birth and death dates and our motto, “Lux esto.” Nearly every day I would stop, and stand in front of it and touch it. “Lux esto, Brandon… be light” I would whisper, choking back shame and grief. After months constantly blaming myself, and wanting nothing to do with the premonitions, I finally came to the realization that there was nothing I had missed, no vital piece that could have saved Brandon. I needed something specific to confront him with, to overcome my own fear, and there must have been a reason that it wasn’t given to me. Usually this reassures me.

**

Maybe it’s not just the future, for you. It certainly isn’t just the future for me. I think the past manages to break through as well. Sometimes, when I walk through the quiet woods at night, listening and searching for a lost someone, I hear the heartbeat of the earth. It may be echoed through a loop of the past; it dances its way into my present. I hear chanting and drums, rituals and life and love from people no longer living in the woods I walk through, unmistakably alien tongues singing to my English ear. I know it is the past because its intrusion into my consciousness is not nearly so invasive or violent—it lacks that skin-crawling feeling of forbidden knowledge that no-one is supposed to have. It feels old, done, somewhat sad… as if it lives on its own somewhere, in a corner that no one can stumble into anymore. And yet, every so often, I seem to find the corner. But more frequently, I seem to trip over and into an errant loop of future that happens to be snaking its way around us, beneath our conscious notice. I have accepted my path. To honor Brandon, and to never forget him, I pay close attention to my dreams. I am no longer afraid of being labeled. The heartbeat of the earth reassures me, soothes me… and reminds me to be aware.

**

But some days I still wake up, and whisper “Lux esto,” praying for forgiveness. The dreams still come.

[AnthonyM83]

My story is I like helping people, but I need a challenge and need it to be interesting.

Won't post more about me, because it doesn't much have to do with my interest in better EMS.