ESSAY | SPIRITUALITY | SELF-AWARENESS

All A Mirage

A good vibes wake-up call

In the past, I couldn’t understand why so many positive people gravitated toward me. I felt so dark, so angst-driven. Why would anyone want to be around someone like me? Yet there they were, little bliss-filled fairies buzzing around me. Granted, they never stayed very long, which often led me to believe that perhaps I had somehow tainted them, turned their lightness down a few notches, but I would run into them years later and nope, they were still fliting about like before. What did amaze me was that they would say things like “oh how I’ve missed your energy” and “you helped me so much” — those were indeed puzzling comments to me.

In recent years, people who’ve known me a long time have made strange comments after reading some of my darker poetry. They’ve said that my poetry doesn’t reflect who they’ve known. Where had I hidden that ‘dark stranger’ all these years? Again, I was dumbstruck. Wasn’t that ‘dark stranger’ exactly who I’d been portraying? I mean ffs, I was a witchy goth for nearly two decades when most of these people knew me! Wasn’t that dark enough? Apparently not.

These conflicting views of who my friends and acquaintances thought I was and who I thought I was has led me to believe that the energy I send out (positive) isn’t in alignment with my own perceptions of who I am (negative). I think I cloaked my internal self in darkness as a defense mechanism at an early age and over the decades, I just believed it was who I was externally also. However, positive energy was able to penetrate that cloak because others recognized it or felt it. In essence, my darkness was mostly a mirage.

Recognition of this mirage has created a bit of an existential crisis for me. Everything I believed about myself has dissipated — the darkness, that deluge of negative energy. Instead, I do feel like I am a positive light, loving, and compassionate now; and apparently always have been to most of the people I’ve known and interacted with. Even my spouse, who has witnessed my bouts of serious depression and the darkness surrounding them, has said that I’ve mostly been a positive force in his life. Still, I feel like I don’t know this me, this Being of good vibrations, who has always been in other people’s eyes, and I have more work to do on myself to discover her fully.

© 2020 Lori Carlson. All Rights Reserved.

A HUGE thanks to 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. for her Weekend Prompt — “My vibes speak louder than my words”

Lori Carlson writes Poetry, Fiction, Articles, Creative Non-Fiction and Personal Essays. Most of her topics are centered around Relationships, Spirituality, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Nature, Loss, Death, and the LGBTQ+ community. Check out her personal Medium blog here.