During my massage with an energy healer last tonight, I journeyed.
I was standing inside a house that felt deeply familiar. I enthusiastically recognized it as the same house from all of the stories I loved as a child.
Anne of Green Gables.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
Alice in Wonderland.
What struck me as odd was realizing that I had always imagined them as the same place. Even when I reread them as an adult. It’s as if every time I read those stories, I wasn’t creating the image. I was remembering it.
The house is small with wood furniture, sparse in a way that feels practical more so than empty. There is a giant stone hearth and narrow stairs leading upward. It feels old world, built for survival more than comfort.
While standing in the home and surveying its contents with a new sense of connection, I asked whose house it was.
The response was immediate: Yours.
I asked who I was there.
You are the head of the house.
My first thought was: Ah, fuck. A man again?! Come on. I’m always a man!!
Because whenever I touch these spaces, these timelines, these memories, I often arrive through masculine energy first. The protector. The provider. The controller. The one trying to keep order.
It was explained to me, during this mini tantrum, that I was not just one person in the house. I was also the daughter. Precocious, outspoken, too curious for the structure around her. I was also the mother. Still outspoken, still alive inside herself, but more careful, attempting to appease the men around her so that her daughter could be granted more freedom than she was afforded. A woman who understood that freedom and safety were constantly negotiating with one another; she was powerful, but not rebellious. She had learned demure manipulation was seemingly just as effective. There was another sibling too. Younger. Blurry around the edges.
This entire family was me.
I could feel how survival moves through generations. How protection becomes control. How fear reshapes love. How women learn silence to stay alive while still trying to pass freedom to their daughters in whatever ways they can.
I attempted to walk upstairs. It took a few tries because I would initially hit darkness or my mind would distract me with a thought, but I finally unlocked the room.
The attic was strange compared to the space I had just left. It looked almost like Edward Scissorhands’ attic. Giant windows everywhere. A-frame ceilings. Light pouring in. It was beautiful, but still felt like a prison.
It didn’t make sense that the top level belonged to an entirely different kind of architecture and time period. There would not have been that much glass. It would have been too cold. Too expensive. Impossible to heat. Maybe it’s a portal? Like the stairs themselves shifted timelines or consciousness or memory. I didn’t get an answer on what the discrepancy meant because we moved into another story.
While he was working on my stomach, I could feel enormous movement in my solar plexus. My throat kept tightening. My breath would catch there like grief trying to force itself through a closed door. I needed to cry. He asked me if this energy was mine or someone else’s and I said mine with conviction. As the energy moved, I suddenly saw The Little Mermaid story unfold. The girl who gives away her voice because she believes something else matters more. Love. Belonging. Acceptance. The girl who disconnects from herself in exchange for proximity to a different life.
Immediately after that I was whisked away to Matilda. Specifically the scene where Bruce is being forced to eat the chocolate cake while everyone watches him in shame. Matilda stands up. Tiny. Certain. Powerful. Cheering him on. Helping him transform shame into something survivable. Something communal. Something empowering. Everyone joins her.
That scene cracked something open in me because I realized how much power exists in someone refusing to participate in another person’s shame. Sam told me during the session that my voice is medicine. That my words are medicine. And that I have a huge energy around helping people alchemize shame by holding space for them to do so. I told him how strangers constantly confess things to me. Massive things. Deep things. Affairs. Secrets. Grief. Things they’ve never told anyone. He said that’s part of my gift. Allowing people to bring their shame into the light without making them carry it alone.
Then I saw Miss Honey. This meekness. This softness. This fear. Transforming beside Matilda’s power.
I realized again that I am both.
I am the woman afraid to speak and the girl who speaks anyway. I am the part of me that learned silence for survival and the part that came here to break that pattern. I am the protector, the mother, the daughter, the medicine woman. All of them exist inside me simultaneously.
At the end of the session, my breathing opened back up completely. The tightness in my throat softened.
The fear is still there. I can feel how deeply I still fear being silenced, punished, rejected, or made into “too much” for using my voice fully. But that fear continues to morph into a stronger sense of knowing.
My voice is medicine because truth is medicine.
When one person speaks truthfully, other people remember they are allowed to exist truthfully, too. I must continue to move through fear and use my voice. I will find courage on the other side.
