You ARE Special!  

My husband likes to say in his endearing and jaded way, “You are special, just like everyone else.” I get his point, yet, although we may have many similarities with one another, there are aspects of us that do indeed stand out. I believe it is part of our life’s mission to find what this is, and make it work for us.

I speak to dead people. It’s truly nothing special, it is just something I have always done, yet I kept hidden for a long time. As a child, I took years of dance classes, voice lessons and acting classes and longed to be a stage actor. My voice however was weak, I was terribly uncoordinated and my brain was horrid at recalling my lines. All my friends seemed to excel in sports, academics, the arts, you name it; but I remained average in all things and wondered if I would ever get a “gift” like my other friends seemed to have. Little did I know, it was staring me (literally) in the face.

I spent my youth terrified of the dark! I slept with a night light well into my 30’s, because I did not fully understand the strange images I saw, felt and heard. (I started hearing voices in my early teens, but after I read that was a sign of being schizophrenic and saw the way my sisters looked at me when I asked them if they heard them too, I decided it was best to keep it to myself.) It wasn’t until years later that I finally learned to stop being scared, quit the talking and actually start listening to what these Spirit people had to say, because for some reason, they kept following me around, and some of them had interesting stories to tell.

I forget this is something that IS special though, and something not everyone is able to do. As humans we have a silly way of NOT seeing our gifts for what they are, and often feel they are not special simply because WE can do them.

Ask yourself, what are you passionate about? What would you do if you didn’t have to do anything? What brings your heart joy? Do you like to create things? What does your mind wander off to when you are simply in the moment and daydreaming? (…and I don’t mean sex!) I spent years in what I thought was my imaginary world, but was anything BUT imaginary. This is what is meant by “follow your bliss.”

The sad part though, is that many people never learn what their bliss is because they avoid soul searching. In order to know what brings your soul joy, you have to know this part of you. Not the human you, but the much deeper part of who you are, in a deeply spiritual way. This means unplugging yourself from all the distractions out there and looking within. A concept that is frightening and often avoided by the masses.

However, it is more than just doing what you like, “gifts” take a great deal of work and dedication. Regardless of what some may think, no one is a “great” simply because they are “a natural.” According the Malcolm Gladwell’s best selling book Outliers, what separates the “gifted” from just being good at something is having practiced it for 10,000 hours. So truly, if you are brave enough to dig within your soul to find your passion, do what you love, and clearly do it often, you will learn to be great at it. But don’t expect to just walk in and expect the world to stop for you, YOU have to make it happen.