My brother and I have been emailing each other a lot. We are remembering how it was growing up together in a little red brick house in Memphis, Tennessee. I realize that these memories shared bring me vividly back to that time in my life. Before my mind took over and ruined everything. As it happens with us all.

For a reason that will forever remain unknown to me, I had my first panic attack around age twelve, shortly before I turned thirteen. I was a child full of promise but after that first attack, my potential was absorbed by that darkness. I couldn’t shine my light. The agoraphobia told me I had to hide, that the world was not a safe place.

No one discussed issues like that and I knew no one else that panicked over social situations. Sadly, this continued after I was married and my husband suffered from the effects of my situation. He was a social animal and couldn’t understand what I was going through.

Now I am free from it and yet my basic nature is extremely introverted. My one love is spirituality, esoteric spirituality in general. When I visited the late psychic Betty Bethards, she said that she, too, suffered from panic attacks and it had to do with being clairsentient. She showed me how to surround myself in white light and that has always helped me.

I have come to understand myself on such a deep level that I honor what I have been given and what has been taken away. It’s a dash of this and a dash of that, all mixed together that makes a note like this resonate with a handful of you. You do the best you can with what you’ve got. Ultimately, you see that your own beauty has never belonged to society but to the light from which you came.

Soul beauty does not belong to us at all, though. It is the property of the light that shines within us all when the chips are down and the stars have gone out. This leaving of the false light must happen before the true light can shine. Take it seriously. Take it as your mission to be yourself.

Never mind if this gift brings solitude and silence with it. Never mind if you cannot share it except in certain ways, all unpredictable to you.

My notes, or essays, whatever they are, arise from the depths of my sorrow, as it has defined and deepened my life. Most extraneous things have fallen away and I now lead an essence life.

Quietude and solitude surround me as I grow older and wiser. I have long since stopped believing that intellectual answers help anyone. You have to hang out with yourself in silence before your real work can begin.

It’s getting late, so I will stop here. More later,

Vicki