When I was 16,
I became highly alarmed about the power of the television. (I can’t imagine that I would have read Marshall McLuhan by then, or Jerry Mander, or any of the other writers who would become famous for writing on this subject within the next decades. So how did I get this idea? My angels?)

I had become very concerned that television – directed by major corporations – was shaping everyone’s mind, and I wanted to avoid that so I could perceive the world more naturally.

I would realize over the decades that many other things shape our perceptions, beginning with the sounds and lights and shapes around us, language, religion, education, the economy, law….

I used to come home from school and find my younger siblings in a half circle, leaned into the dramas of Lost in Space or I Dream of Jeanie.

I went straight to my bedroom, shut the door and read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or book on self-hypnosis or dream interpretation, practiced those skills, or practiced pencil sketches of hands and feet, a recommended exercise in books on drawing.

I loved my time alone. I wonder now if it was the essential recovery time needed by people on the autism spectrum, forced to interact with multiple others all day long, while trying to act like a neurotypical.

Maybe so, but I was also consciously avoiding the danger of being molded into something devised by corporations, delivered through the TV, and instead choosing what I firmly believed was a healthier way to gain perspective on our world and prepare myself for living in it most effectively.

Many things took my life in directions I did not plan, and even tried to avoid, but I was still able to avoid the television from 1974 to 2014.

And I believe I held onto, at least better than most, some of my natural but culturally-denied abilities.

I’ve had lifelong experiences of having portals open for me to see through or to be drawn through. I have tried to will them to reveal themselves or open for me, but have never succeeded; the portals clearly are controlled by somebody else, mostly my angels.

I also seem to have had other intelligences enter my body, often to do some healing or other amazing physical feat, during which I watch, powerless to act, often in amazement, and then the other leaves and I am back in full control.

This is my most common experience, but I have also once or twice had someone else take over who embarrassed me horribly. She seems to be an inner saboteur, installed to maybe entertain some trickster god?

Or – forcing myself to try to see this in a more positive light – maybe a spiritual challenge to learn to keep my own portals better protected?

(This is a confession I do not like to make. But it seems important for others to know.)

These abilities we call psychic, multidimensional, spiritual, or crazy – are skills I believe are our human birthright but have been unfortunately deadened or tightly repressed by all of these aspects of our culture.

In a different culture, they might have been encouraged, nurtured, directed, crafted into an effective resource for each one of us on our soul’s journey.

Compared to that possibility, the society we are living in is… difficult to describe without using the worst superlatives.

I have not done the work I might have to craft my abilities, but I have acknowledged them and tried to work with them, a little. And frequently my angels seem to get through to me.

It’s them that I credit with warning me about the television. And there have been many other times they have warned me of danger and given me direction and comfort.

Again, I credit these gifts with avoiding the screen.

I never saw a Seinfeld episode until many years later when I wanted to see what had captivated everyone’s attention for so many years. I was appalled. Somehow the corporations have gotten the masses to laugh at people treating other people so poorly and laughing and mocking?! It hurt my heart to realize, and it also explained things I have witnessed in this world that have made no sense to me.

I never saw Dallas, ever.

I never saw The X-Files, except once when I dropped by one of my adult children’s apartments and found them there with friends expecting us to Hush! because that show was on, gluing everyone’s attention.

When I saw that show finally, on Netflix, I was hooked. Especially one of the early scenes, where the girl has red blood flow from her nostril.

I had once had a very bizarre night followed by blowing out a large red blood clot and discovering other physical wounds on my body.

Then many of my weird experiences of the past 14 years began to be depicted on this TV show.

I had only gotten a big screen and Netflix subscription after I had found myself disabled mysteriously with what I would learn years later was Lyme Disease. I could barely feed myself, but I couldn’t lay in bed, bored, but worse, filled with anxiety.

What had happened to me? I had suddenly become so sick I could not keep myself fed. But I was too proud to ask anyone for help. My boyfriend came over and treated me as though I was being dramatic and refused to help me make a meal when I had started and then given up and was sitting on a kitchen chair, devastated. He sneered and left.

Somehow I ordered a big screen, figured out the subscription, and I soon began to sit for days on end, slumped, dull, clicking, somewhat starving, and watching The X-Files.

Since then, I’ve been struggling with the same addiction I used to feel sorry for almost everyone else in the world for succumbing to.

So I look back now to when I was 16, so certain of my convictions, and somehow so strong as to avoid for 40 years, 1974 to 2014, doing what everyone else did.

I chose the luxury of quiet time alone. And I want to get back there again. But anxiety keeps me coming back to these artificial dramas, I suspect for the sense of relief at others’ dramas neatly coming to an end.

But then the excitement comes again, their dramas repeated in a slightly different form, and around we go.

We are better than this.