What it costs to belong nowhere — because you won't cut yourself in half I have been asked, as an adult, not to come back to church. And I have been held at arm's length, just as firmly, by the witches. Rejected by both. Not because I was bad at either one — but because I refused to be only one. Because I walked into each room carrying the whole of myself, and neither room would make space for all of me. That's what it is to be a medium and a Christian: to stand in the hallway between two doors that both closed, and to slowly understand that the problem was never that you didn't belong. The problem was that you wouldn't split yourself in two to fit. And here is the thing I want to say at the very start, because it's the whole point and I'll come back to it at the end: medium, Christian, gifted, pagan, witch — every one of those is just a title. A word handed to us by other people to define, or to try to describe, who someone is and what they believe. And no single word can ever actually do that; each one of them falls short. Worse, a title means nothing at all without genuine ownership of it and active participation in it — otherwise it's just a label stuck to the outside of a person. They are only words. And words like these don't merely sort people into groups. They cut whole people into pieces. Let me tell you how I got to that hallway.
Born this way
I grew up gifted — intuitive, empathic, a medium. But let me be clear about what that actually means for a child, because the word "gift" does a lot of lying here. No one around me understood me that way. No one accepted the experiences I tried, so carefully, to share. And when you are a child with that kind of sight, in a world that has already decided it's evil, it does not feel like a gift at all. It feels like a curse. My memories go back further than most people believe is possible — clear, distinct, confirmed by others, from before I was even a year old. For as long as I have existed, I've been governed by instincts I couldn't explain and didn't choose. I couldn't stand a lie; it would set my whole body wrong — which is a nearly impossible way to move through childhood, when you don't yet understand how perception bends people's stories without them ever meaning to deceive. And worse, I couldn't stay quiet about what I saw. I said the true thing out loud. Children who do that do not get called perceptive. They get called difficult, dramatic, and — the one that cut deepest — a liar. I wasn't afraid of the others I saw and heard; they'd simply always been there. As a teenager who knew no better, I even thought it was hilarious to dare a spirit during a Ouija session — and then get smacked in the head a second later for the trouble. I laughed. I didn't yet know I was playing with something I'd one day have to learn to hold with real care.
The woods at seven
When I was around seven, I walked into the woods behind our house for no reason other than to be near more of the living green of it. And out there, alone, I felt something — a connection, an actual physical vibration. And something in me, without a single thought behind it, began calling out to the elements to come and surround me.
I'll spare you most of the details. But I'll tell you the part that still stops me: decades later, learning from a High Priestess, I finally understood what that seven-year-old had actually been doing. I was casting a circle of protection around myself. At seven. On pure instinct. When the only reference I had for a "witch" in the entire world was The Wizard of Oz. I didn't learn that. I didn't choose it or read it or copy it. It came out of me like it had always been in me — because it had. And it was in that moment, all those years later, that a quiet realization settled over me: I may have been "a witch" all along — not because I ever set out to become one, but because I'd been doing these things by pure instinct, with no name for any of them, since I was a small child. It was never something I picked up. It was something I'd always been.
The church that called it evil
And I grew up in the church. Many churches, actually — and every last one of them named the things I could do as darkness. Evil. Something to be feared and prayed out of me. I was reminded of it often, from the pulpit and in the pews, and it was quietly, steadily reinforced at home. Eventually, as an adult, I was made unwelcome outright — asked, in plain words, not to come back. Sit with what that does to a person: to be told, again and again, by the people who are supposed to hold you closest to God, that the truest, most innate part of you is the very thing standing between you and Him. That who you were made to be is the thing you most need to be saved from.
Drowning at fourteen
By the time I was fourteen, the war between who I was created as and who I was expected to be finally caved in on top of me. All the silence, all the denial, all the years of pressing myself down into a shape that would be allowed — it came crashing in at once. I was drowning in depression and anxiety. I was paralyzed in whole areas of my life: refusing friendships, undone by something as ordinary as the thought of going out in public. And here is the cruelest irony of it, the one almost no one understood: because I had spent so many years trying to deny the gift — never accepting it, never being taught to understand it, never being allowed to learn to hold it — I lost control of it completely. You cannot govern what you've spent your life pretending isn't there. So school was not school. My classmates were not only my classmates; they arrived with their deceased family standing beside them. The voices in the hallway weren't only kids chattering — they were everyone else, too, all at once. The noise was crushing. Everywhere I turned, the room was spinning with people — living and dead — each one vying for my attention, and me with no wall, no filter, no off switch, because I'd been taught to hate the very part of me that might have learned to build one. And for all of it, I got one label: too much. Too emotional, too sensitive, too dramatic. A liar, for saying what I received and for naming the lies I could plainly see. Too much, and untrue — the exact two things a child in that much pain least needs to hear.
The other side of the same wall
Here's a part people tend to get wrong about me, so let me set it straight — because the accurate version matters. After the churches, I did spend time in witch forums, and I eventually reached out to a High Priestess to learn from her directly. But not because I was trying to become a witch, and not because I was shopping for a new religion to belong to. I did it for my work. In the paranormal field — especially in residential cases, inside people's actual homes — a family's belief system and spiritual practices are one of the most crucial pieces of the whole puzzle. What people believe, and what they've practiced, shapes what
you may be dealing with and what you're likely to encounter. And clients are not always honest about it — sometimes out of shame, sometimes out of fear, sometimes because they don't realize it matters. So I needed to understand it from the inside: the signs to watch for, the practices that leave their mark on a space, and what I'd need to know to help reset the balance in a home. That is why I sat down with a High Priestess — to be good at the work of helping people, not to delve into the craft for myself. And even there — even walking in as a student, for the most practical of reasons — I still carried my own belief in God. Not a traditional one, not an evangelical one: my own understanding of the divine, arrived at through my own lens. And that was quietly unwelcome too. I was too much of a believer to ever be fully embraced in that world — in the very same way I'd been too much of a mystic to be kept in the church. So there it was: the same wall, from the opposite side. One world pushed me out for the gifts I carried. The other kept me at the threshold because I wouldn't set my God down to cross it. Held at a distance coming and going, by opposite camps, for the exact same reason — because I would
not be anything less than the whole of who I am.
There isn't a word for what I am
Because of the way I'm made, I have always seen the world differently than the people around me — not only the physical world, but the spiritual one, and the plain truth that the two were never separate to begin with. They are connected, on every level, all the time. That isn't a belief I went out and adopted. It's simply how reality has always looked through my eyes. And that is exactly why no single label has ever been able to hold me. I am a Christian, by definition. I am a witch, by definition. I am a medium, by definition. I am a pagan, by definition. But those are only words — labels — and I am each of them in some ways, and so much less and so much more than each of them, depending entirely on who you're asking and which door they happen to be guarding. My belief system is still rooted, firmly and unmistakably, in Christianity — just with a working knowledge that reaches well past what most of it has been willing to understand. There is no tidy, current, spirituality- shaped definition for that. There's no box for it on the form. There's no room with that name on the door. For most of my life, having no word for myself felt like proof that something was wrong with me — one more way I didn't fit. I understand it completely differently now: I don't lack a definition. I exceed the ones on offer.
God doesn't make mistakes
And underneath all of it, holding the whole thing up, there is one belief I keep coming back to — the bedrock of it, for me and my faith. To deny any part of how I was created — to take the gifts I was given and call them evil, to cut them off and throw them away — would be to say, out loud or in silence, that God made a mistake when He made me. And my God does not make mistakes. You want proof? Go outside. Look at nature. Look at the systems He set into motion — and whether you believe He did it in six days or through a fourteen- billion-year unfolding that started with a bang, it honestly doesn't matter to me here. Just look at it. How intricate it is. How intentional. How balanced, how staggeringly complex, how impossibly and achingly beautiful. I trained as a naturalist; I have studied these systems up close, and I can tell you they are not a happy accident that merely turned out lovely. They are precision. They are artistry. They are a mind at work. And here is what I finally, finally let myself believe: if He can do that — if He can build a forest that knows how to burn and be reborn, an ecosystem holding ten thousand moving parts in flawless balance — then He did not slip up when He got to me. He did not absent-mindedly hand a
little girl gifts He never meant for her to carry. I am not a flaw in an otherwise perfect creation. I am the creation. Made on purpose. Made, gifts and all, exactly as He intended. To keep denying that was never humility. It was calling the Creator careless. And I couldn't do that anymore.
I stopped trying to fit in their boxes
Here is where the story turns, and it's the same turn I keep coming back to in everything I write: one day, I simply stopped. I stopped trying to cram myself into boxes that other people had built, designed, and ruled — boxes I was never going to fit, because they were never made with someone like me in mind. And I could only stop because, somewhere along the way, I had finally done the deeper work: I know my whys. I know exactly why I believe what I believe about God, about the unseen, about the gifts I was born carrying. And when your beliefs are genuinely your own — examined, questioned, and chosen on purpose — you stop needing anyone else's permission to exist. The bridge I live on isn't a contradiction I have to resolve or apologize for. Faith and intuition, God and gift, the sacred and the seen-beyond — for me, these were never at war. They were only ever made to feel like a war by people who needed me to pick a side so they'd feel more comfortable. I don't owe anyone that amputation. Neither do you.
If you've been standing in that hallway too
I wrote this for the person who has been made unwelcome for the sin of being whole. Too spiritual for the skeptics, too faithful for the mystics, too much of a believer and too much of a questioner to sit comfortably in anyone's row. If you've spent your life quietly leaving pieces of yourself at various doors just to be let inside, I want you to hear this clearly: you were never the problem. The rooms were just too small.
You do not have to cut yourself in half to be allowed in. You are permitted to be the whole, uncut, doesn't-fit-the-brochure truth of yourself. And if no existing room will seat all of you at once — then, love, you are allowed to build a table of your own. And hear the thing I promised I'd circle back to: medium, Christian, gifted, pagan, witch — they are only titles. Only words, handed to us by other people to sort us and to shrink us. Take the ones that are true and own them — live them, participate in them, make them genuinely yours — but never again let a single one of those words be used to whittle you down to one piece of yourself, or to decide which room you're allowed to enter. They divide people into groups, and whole people into pieces. You were never meant to be filed under any one of them. You are not a label. You are a whole person — and that was always the point. That's the honest reason Warrior Awakening exists. I got tired of standing in the hallway waiting for a door that would open to all of me. So I stopped waiting, and I built the room I could never find — one where you don't have to choose between your mind and your faith and your gifts, where no part of you gets left in the corridor. If you've been out there in that same hallway, between two doors that both closed on you — there's a seat here. Come as you are. All of you. Every last part you were told to leave behind. — Jen