I hear voices different from most. At least different from most people whose accounts I have read. Different from how you may have heard that most voice-hearers hear them. There’s a lot of diversity of experience amongst voice-hearers, but still, sometimes I feel like an edge case. So I wrote this down: an account of my voices and the ways I’ve found to work with them.

I have seen the Dreaming, and I have heard tell of the Hunting, the hunt that I am now on because I can never not be. I can never not be seeking, though what I find may differ from what was promised during the Dreaming. I hunt because my ancestors hunted for a hundred thousand years. Under a dark sky. Before fire and steel. I will always be hunting.

You see a vision of the firebird, spreading fire across the world

You are out of your body as you get messages from higher life forms, no self to rely on

You remember the details of a past life, then another

You access the gears and wheels of heaven, tasked to run heavenly affairs from earth

You are stuck in a deep horrific hell in your hallway, replete with tortures and defilements

You are always dying and your sense of stable identity is annihilated at each moment.

There is nowhere to stand.

We have a problem in America with universal career advice that completely ignores social class. Worse, when we do consider class, we condescend and we pontificate: we don’t ask the hardest questions, and thus we don’t give the best advice. To really have this conversation, we need to get nuanced, but not necessarily in the ways you might think.