What if you could not trust your senses?

All of your life you were told up was down and blue was green. Every nerve ending tells you the wind is blowing but the people you trust with your life tell you it’s still.

When I was fourteen, I stood in church with my friends, hands lifted to God, longing to feel something. A woman named Grace walked over to me. I remember I was wearing my favorite black dress. Cotton, and nearly floor length. While my eyes were closed and my lips parted in praise to the Lord, she laid her bejeweled hand on my abdomen and proclaimed, “Bubble up, Holy Spirit.” I did not know what to do.

She prayed. And prayed. I knew something was supposed to happen. My mouth was supposed to open and words in an ancient language I had never learned to speak were supposed to come unbidden. The power of God’s spirit was supposed to overtake me and flow through me. You see, this was a tongues church.

I won’t lie to you. I began speaking in tongues that night. I don’t know if it was the Holy Spirit of Elohim or a teenage girl trying to fit in. I just know I did it.

There is this feeling I sometimes get. It’s a mix of excitement and anxiety. It does feel like something is bubbling up inside of me. All the varieties of butterflies that live in me take flight and rattle around me sending waves through my nervous system. When I was a Christian and this happened, I prayed, often in tongues. I didn’t know what to do with this nervous energy, where it came from, or what it meant. I knew my body was sending me a signal and I wanted it to abate.

And I have that feeling right now. But I’m not scared of it. This nervous energy coursing through me feels alive and empowering. There is something bubbling up inside of me but it’s not an ancient angelic tongue or the spirit of a deity. It’s a new wave of creativity and confidence in my abilities and talents. It’s fresh ideas flowing through me, not gibberish words.

When you spend the majority of your life surrounded by people who desperately want to control you, your behavior, and your belief systems, you can start to lose touch with your intuition. Gaslighting becomes all you know. You question your own senses. Is up really down? Is black actually white? Is reason madness and truth just lies? So much of my adult life has been spent trying to make sense of the dissonance between what I could see and what I was being told. People, I’m sorry to tell you, love to lie. I learned that I could not trust myself. The words, “Are you calling me a liar?” still echo in my ears. How many times was I told that what I believed was the lie, despite evidence to the contrary. And what they were telling me was the truth, even though it made no sense. I was the one who was wrong and I needed to just say “ok” and accept what I was being told.

Gaslighting is a special circle of hell for an autistic person. We already feel like aliens in a neurotypical world. We already spend too much of our time trying to understand what we don’t understand. And, to be honest, when we do figure out something on our own we feel pretty proud of ourselves. So to come along and tell us that we can’t trust our own senses is particularly cruel.

But nature is healing, my loves. The wolves of my intuition have stabilized the ecosystem of my gut and the river of my confidence is changing course. (If that sentence seems like gibberish to you, just pretend I’m speaking in tongues. Or click the link about how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone Park improved the ecosystem so much that the river changed course.)

The longer I spend living a life apart from those gaslighting fucks, the more my confidence returns. I’m starting to believe myself, to trust my eyes and ears. My intuition is healing. New ideas are coming and the powerful urge to create, to write, to sing, to be myself unabashedly is stronger than it has been in such a long time. This thing bubbling up inside me is the power of me. It’s excitement at all of the ideas spawning in my mind. It’s the belief that I am strong, smart, talented, creative, and beautiful. It’s trust in myself. And being able to trust myself is such a gorgeous feeling.

I won’t be spouting any ancient tongues today. Instead of trying to rid myself of this bubbling energy, I’m going to let it fuel me to create the world I want to be a part of.

Let’s. Fucking. Go, my darlings. Let’s bubble the shit out of life today.