Realize the Realness of My Really Real Realities

*Evaluate a different situation where a reality only exists in a persons mind.  Have you every experienced a reality that only existed in your mind.

It took me a long time to come up with a situation that would fit for this blog. I considered writing about imaginary friends, but I thought it was a little too literal. Perhaps it’s not, but I did not think it would be a concrete example of a false reality.

But thinking about my childhood reminded me of one thing: ghosts. As a child I was deathly afraid of them. Spirits, ghosts, evil ghosts (dab in Hmong), and shadows (ntxoo in Hmong) have always played an elemental role in our Shamanist (the Hmong religion is often referred to as shamanism, but this is not an entirely correct term to define our spirituality) rituals and beliefs. According to my elders, ghosts were everywhere. Good, friendly ghosts of grandmothers and grandfathers deceased, and bad, malicious ghosts with the objective of pure mischief and torment. I often heard stories of ghosts that possessed my relatives and drove them mad for minutes. There were stories of Sitting-Ghosts, where a ghost sat upon a sleeping person and paralyzed them for the whole night. (This is clinically known as sleep paralysis.) Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts! I was a scared little child, always on edge at the slightest noise.

Of course, my parents said that there were no spirits in our house.

“This house was built in the 1970s. Only two families lived in it before us. No one died.” my father always said to reassure me that there was not a ghost waiting to sit on me in bed at night. My house remained a safe zone.

But everywhere else scared me. I was always afraid of accidentally bringing a ghost home. My grandma told me that sometimes ghosts do that, follow you home. Whenever we visited my cousins’ creaky houses in the Frogtown neighborhoods I was cautious to always be near someone in the light. When we drove by cemetaries I held my breath like the girls in my Girl Scout troop instructed me to. Everywhere carried a sense of fear in me.

This notion of ghosts really burnt into me when I was eight or nine-years-old.

I had received a gift of a snowman doll that one of my great-aunts made for me. While I thought it was adorable, for some reason I had the notion that in it carried a ghost. Ridiculous, I know! But that was my reality. Somehow I had convinced myself of the ubiquitous spirits. That same snowman doll, whom I named Willis, went everywhere with me because I thought I had to love it so that it wouldn’t someday eat my soul.

(My sister is calling me weird right now. x))

I even believed I had a ghostly experience at my elementary school, Highwood Hills. I was in the girl’s bathroom by myself when all of a sudden the lock to the stall door rattled. I didn’t hear anyone enter the bathroom, nor did I find anyone when I was finished. 

While there is probably some logical explanation, at the time I was terrified! Pair that with my haunted snowman and an odd friend who claimed she had a ghost named George in her attic and I was set for a life of ghostdom. Every little twitch bothered me. I saw shadows moving in the corner of my eyes. I never really told anyone about my immense fear of ghosts. They only knew I hated being alone.

I don’t really know when this fear began ebbing away. Perhaps as I entered middle school? It’s kind of an embarrassing thing to recall, but the change from being such a scared little kid to a regular (more mature, though not so much more) teenager was so abrupt that I look back on myself as if I were a different person.

I’m a skeptic now. I believe in ghosts because I choose to, it’s still a part of my religion. Perhaps I am now not the most spiritual person, but I am definitely a lot more comfortable with other people, in other places, and essentially with myself.

I hope this makes sense to you, Mr. Gullickson. It makes sense to me! I think that that was definitely a reality of mine: ghosts everywhere. I guess you can say it was a reality of fear of mine. I was not a paranoid kid 24/7, mind you. Just a little too gullible.

Oh dear, this blog turned out to be a little bit of self-therapy, no? x)

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