"Privileged and Delusional": A Ghost Story

A few nights ago I had a dream that I was being chased by authorities intent on finding and capturing me. I hid in a dumpy out of the way motel where I thought I'd be safe for a while. I spent all my time in the motel out of my mind with paranoia and fear, closing the curtains and not leaving the room. A day or two in there was a knock on my door. I slid the door open just a crack to peer through and was met with a bloody severed arm that was shoved through the small space. I screamed and tried to shut the door. Holding the other end of the severed arm was a ghostly young girl. Her body flickered in and out like an horror movie. She was a haunting, a horror. I screamed at her out of pure panic and fear and overwhelmed to get out. I didn't have time for this. But she haunted me for the next few days I was in the motel, appearing in my room trying to get my attention. At this point in the dream I knew that she was a part of me that was trying to talk to me, a part that I needed to integrate and listen to, but I was so scared of being found by the authorities that I had no capacity to talk to her. No attention. I just wanted her away from me. A few days later when it was time to leave the motel I was crazed out of my mind. My room was a disaster, covered in trash. My mind was scattered and fracturing. I knew that I seemed delusional and I was seeing things that weren't there, ghosts everywhere. But I was too stressed and anxious to give any attention to looking like I had it all together. I left the motel and kept running from the authorities. The next day, awake now, I sat down to talk to this ghost girl. I dropped into my body in an active imagining state and I came up in a lake with a dock. The ghost girl stood with a lantern at the end of the dock, beckoning to me. I swam over to her through the lake. She was flickering again, alternatively bloody and static, fear inducing. But I told her that I was ready to talk to her, that I wasn't afraid, that I was curious about her. We floated in the water of the lake together under the stars and we talked. She is the part of me that deeply, deeply knows things. In the way that ghosts and stories, no things, hold secrets, know what has happened and what will happen. But are so obscured by the fear of death and the unknown that no one wants to listen to them. Their ways of communicating are through the senses, in pieces through gesturing and visioning. They don't make logical sense. To gain their knowledge, you have to want to listen to them, have to want to know what knowledge they have more than you're scared of them. You have to want the knowledge more than you fear the consequences of the knowledge. And you have to be willing to be seen as delusional and irrational by those who don't believe in ghosts. She is the part of me that deeply knows things. She has the gift of prophecy. And I've spent so much time running from her because of my fear of what other people think of this kind of prophetic, self-driven inner knowledge. A few days ago, I was sharing some of my felt sense of how things are changing in my life with one of my friends. I was talking about the deep need I felt to really completely unhook from any kind of external authority, from any idea that other people know what's best for me, or are in control of my sense of safety and stability. I was telling him about my deep fear that this wouldn't work out for me, that I was actually deeply delusional and that the intuitions I had about what I should do wouldn't be true. But then I was willing to stare down this fear and try anyway. I was willing to act from my own intuition to make decisions based on that rather than what any other authority told me I should do. And in what I'm sure was a well-meaning way, he said that's a very privileged perspective, Grace. You need to recognize that most of the world can't live that way. And I hadn't said anything about anyone else needing to do what I was doing, but this still pierced me. Privileged and delusional are the two words that haunt my brain the most. There are the words other people have used to try to talk me out of my inner knowing and my sense of how I should move through the world. There also the words I used to talk myself out of it. So I'm doing this podcast episode as a kind of paranormal investigation into these words because I don't want to be haunted by them anymore. And because I know I'm not the only one there haunting. I think these two words have a grip on us collectively right now that keeps us out of our own knowing and truth. And like with my ghost self, I want to look them in the eyes and talk to them. Part of unhooking from other people's authority is being able to recognize when someone is trying to pull you down instead of offering you a perspective that you can't see. Privileged and delusional are particularly tricky in this way because they get used in the guys of care and concern, but often actually are weapons to try to pull you out of your own perspective and authority. And both of these words are so effective because they do have meanings and uses that are rooted in care and in an attempt to change things. Both are words about perspective and about recognizing your own perspective and its limits and about recognizing when you're trying to impose that perspective on someone else. Privileged has obviously been a very necessary and important word in the past few years. In the necessary sense, it's used when someone is making judgments about another person's life or trying to say that how things worked for them should work for everyone. And in the best sense when people use the word privilege, it's actually a way to remind people to stay in their own lane and not to use their own experience to dictate what's possible for someone else's circumstances. It's an invitation to humility and right-size-idness, a reminder that you don't know another person's experience, that just because something worked for you doesn't mean it will work for someone else. It's used when someone says that another person should be able to succeed or shouldn't struggle or need help or should have the same perspective they do. It's a recognition that universality doesn't exist. But on the flip side, the more negative side, privilege gets used as a weapon to talk people out of their lived experience when it applies to their own life. It gets used to make people doubt themselves by pointing out the smallness and limits of their perspective. And in my experience, it pulls me out of my knowing and into not the truth of other people's perspectives, but my fear version of them. It pulls me back into status quo thinking. And when I feel into this in my body, the first version of privilege, the positive version actually feels soothing and grounded because it's a reminder that I don't have all the answers and I don't know the truth of other people's experiences. It's a reminder to listen better, to not use my judgments to try to dictate things about other people's lives and a reminder to stay in my lane. In the second version, the more negative version makes me feel outside of my body, like I can't see everything I need to from my own perspective. In a way that makes me feel panicky, like I should have been more hyper vigilant, I should have been looking outside of myself more. It's judgments about my own life and a codependent weight of how my decisions affect other people that makes me feel like a small child. And I think behind the less positive use of this word is a lot of pain from people around self-imposed restrictions. I notice that I get called privileged when I try to do something big or something different. Even when I'm not trying to say that everyone should do what I'm doing, it touches a wound in people. I think it's not everyone can do that wound, which is really a "I don't feel like I have permission to do that wound." The people who use this word have the sense that they can't do things, but this sense in my experience usually comes less from an accurate analysis of the stomach structures. That hold them in place and the agency they actually have to navigate them. And it comes more from internal barriers that are not actually rooted in reality. It's the "I could never do that" that actually is pretty self-imposed and has a ring of longing about it. I've had this come up a lot lately around the idea of following your inner authority. And what I hear in response to this is other people don't get to follow their inner authority. There's this idea that living this way is privileged and it can only be done if you already have a lot of agency. And I really don't believe this is true. I think that unhooking from other people's authority, especially the authority of empire, is crucial. and it's mostly an internal decision and an internal state. A lot of the people I learn this from are the people others would point at to say they can't do that. The people who are less privileged. People have different amounts of agency and different moves they can make and are constrained by circumstance in different ways but who has the ability to make this mental shift to change their internal state cannot be linearly determined or concisely captured by the idea of privilege. There may absolutely be limits to how someone is able to tune into and turn towards their inner authority but it's often the least privilege who come to the awareness and in some cases are culturally born into the awareness that outer authority is a sham and a scam. Most of the most radical thinkers are not privileged because radicalization comes from feeling yourself at odds with society and I think this is really key. Your intuition is responsive to and built for your unique circumstances. Your inner authority knows the limitations and unique circumstances of your particular life. Not every person's intuition is going to tell them to quit their job. A lot of times it's say at your job but learn how to disconnect and do X on the side or in your community and I think people really confuse following your inner authority with doing whatever the fuck you want. Not the same. When I think about the people who use privileged in the way that bothers me it's always people who have a vested interest in keeping me smaller even if that interest comes from a place of love and wanting to keep me safe. It comes from people who think safety comes from maintaining the status quo and I never hear these words used in this way from actual revolutionaries and dreamers. Because a revolutionary understanding of taking action involves wanting people including and particularly those who have more privilege to do things that de-center and break down systemic and mental barriers so that they can bring others with them and make it possible for others. Nothing changes if someone doesn't decide they have the bandwidth or privilege to take a risk and do something different. And it feels very powerful for me to feel into the forbidden fear and longing that I hear behind these words that the people who use them at me I think are triggered by mine and others ability to follow an inner authority. They see in it a mirror that reflects their fear at following their own authority. The walls and the guards they have up that say I'm not allowed to do that. Everything would burn down if I did that. This is why our inner authority can often appear as a horror movie figure and Omen of Fear and Towers crumbling and things falling apart. In my dream I don't have time to listen to my ghost figure because I'm too busy trying to survive trying to stay on the run. If I listen to her maybe I'll get distracted from constantly listening for the authorities coming to get me. There's a hyper vigilant element to privilege that tells us what we should be doing instead of listening to our inner authority which is keeping on the status quo hamster wheel of a constant survival state. Constantly looking outside ourselves to an outer authority who tells us what to do, where to go, and how to be safe. This is hyper vigilant because when it doesn't come from inside you have to keep scanning to make sure things aren't changing to make sure you are doing it right. And the real privilege in turning towards inner authority involves the courage or the inner stability to get off the hamster wheel to stop running to stop scanning long enough to slow down and listen to your inner authority. And I can't account for what makes someone ready to do that but what I can say is that the game is changing and that running on the hamster wheel is no longer an effective way to say safe if it ever was. It feels more and more to me like a survival necessity to start tuning into your inner authority because the outer authority is crumbling and fracturing and breaking down which brings us to delusional. Getting off this wheel and slowing down enough to listen to yourself. Tuning inwards instead of tuning outwards does fundamentally mean living in a different reality which is what delusional means out of touch with reality, misled, and ironically with an implication that you can't trust yourself or what you're seeing and that you need other people to bring you back to reality. A big part of delusional is about paying attention to things others can't hear or see or things that others simply discount. Ghosts and supernatural and occult stories play a lot with this. Should I listen to this? It doesn't seem logical, it doesn't seem rational, it doesn't work by the rules of consensus reality. Everyone is telling me to ignore this ghost side here, the knocks on the doors, the visions that I have, etc. And there's a price to pay for choosing to listen, which is that you fall out of step with the logic of the rational world. Usually what this really means is falling out of connection with the people around you who are invested in this world and this is scary, this is a horror. Falling out of connection means becoming vulnerable, possibly losing the protection of those people or becoming vulnerable to those people, to the potential violence of their attempts to bring you back in line and back to order. There's also this interesting idea that it is privileged to be delusional. The people who usually listen to ghosts or to signs in their dreams are children or childlike and it's also very feminine coded in the way that femininity gets coded as childlike. Rationalism is put forth as how the real world works on linear time, on the scene, the planned, the clear, the logical, and delusion is the realm of the child, the mad, the woman, the oppressed, anyone who can't deal or is unfit to deal with the linear rational world. This is not everyone can live like that, not everyone can live by the stars, not everyone can live by their dreams or their intuition. Some of us have to go out and make money. And as I'm listening to this list of words that I've heard thrown at me, the words that I repeat in my own head, that living intuitively is self-indulgent, it's fantasy land, it's head in the clouds, it's childlike. In a lot of these words, I again hear a jealousy and belonging from the people who use them. They believe that the only way to be safe is to live completely in the consensus reality, completely controlled, completely rational, and a part of them, I think, wishes that they could live in said in the world of intuition and symbols and feeling. Because a big part of this world is indeed childlike, it's connective, it's being held by something larger, it's listening, it's using your creativity. And the core wound that I hear is that it's not safe to trust, it's not safe to surrender to yourself or to something bigger. And thinking here about a podcast I listened to from Myelina and Alicia Dava that talked about how the shift from quote unquote "meteoric" which is really egalitarian living, to patriarchy was a trauma response to rapid climate change and a loss of the abundance of food, water, land that existed before. Turning to outer authority, to patriarchy, to rational thinking, and to logic and control for safety as a response is the trauma response to a loss of safety, a loss of being held. But the truth is it only takes a glance at our world to see that none of this actually guarantees safety, it's a mess out there. So it's interesting that this space, the space of intuition and inner authority is both the world of the child and the world of horrors and monsters and ghosts. It's at once both innocent and playful and deeply horrific and fearful. It holds both the beauty of being held by something larger than yourself and the fear, the fall that you can't trust that, that it won't work out, that it's dangerous. And when I think about this I'm always reminded that child's play is rarely as innocent and sweet as adults seem to think. Child's play isn't actually about safety and comfort, the play that I did as a child involved, playing out kidnappings, murders, child violence regularly. This kind of play is actually about having a container to experience intensity within. And that's what I do think that intuition and spirituality gives is a different perspective. perspective on the horrors, an experience of being held that gives you a heightened ability to move through the hard and terrible things with curiosity and creativity and openness. No one gets to be truly safe, but you can open to the horrors like a good horror movie as part of the movement of the universe and the breath of God, or you can try to repress them and they'll show back up in your dreams. Coming back for a minute to this idea of delusional being about not understanding how the rules of reality work. This is actually incredibly powerful, especially when you are able to use it as a bridge, when you can acknowledge what the rules are, what reality is, but you feel a disconnect from it and an inner understanding that it doesn't have to be this way. Not understanding the rules, or at least not understanding why there are these rules, is a bridge into a different world. And this doesn't need to be a super intense thing where we push away everything that held us and kept us safe in the old world. The logic of the old world did not and does not work for everyone, but it worked for some people, and especially for those of us with material privilege, it got us where we are. And we can acknowledge that, I think, and be grateful for that and recognize that it's possible now to do things differently. Knowing that the rules of the old world can still help us through the transition, but we need to recognize that they're not it anymore, and it's time to pull our emotional investment out of them and stop hanging our weight on them. And if you're moving into a world of ghosts, of dream images, of different logic and intuition, you got to be okay with leaving a logical world behind, which also means being okay with other people not understanding you. This is a really hard one for me, but it really is the ability to nurture an inner vision before anyone else sees or understands it. And as I'm thinking through these ideas, I keep thinking about how many of these skills are visionary skills and genius skills. The ability to believe in your own vision before anyone else says, to listen to what you see and nurture it, to not be disweighted by other people telling you you're crazy. People who create visionary new things have these skills. And I do think there are skills that can be cultivated, and that this is probably actually a big difference between someone with their head in the clouds, and someone who really has a vision that they see all the way through. The second person gets good at not letting the accusations of privilege and delusion, or whatever other words the scary voices in our head use, slow them down or disweight them. They build capacity for these words. And I think this goes along with having a very strong sense of what the new other world is, getting to know your ghosts, strengthening your intuition, making your inner knowing and your inner world come alive and feel incredibly vivid so that it feels more real to you than the logic, outer authority, quote unquote, real world. The horrifying ghost from my dream couldn't get my attention because I was so busy worrying about outer authorities, worrying about whether or not I was safe, whether they could come knocking at my door at any moment. Refusing to listen to her resulted in mania, the contents of my hotel room spread all over the floor, trash everywhere, pulling my hair out. Refusing the inner world is deeply painful. And there's also something terrifying about listening to these ghosts, these parts, because once you listen to your inner knowing you can't unknow it. In my experience there's a drive and a force behind it that's very hard to say no to once you hear it. It tells you to change things, to trust fall, to do things your brain would rather not do. And sometimes it can feel safer not to know, not even to ask or to listen. But in my dream when I didn't listen, I ended the dream still on the run. Still on the road, moving to another hotel, running down hallways, hearing the thud of police boots behind me. Maybe the ghost who could pass through walls and works with the logic of the occult would have known a different way out. Maybe if I had listened to her, I would have gone through a secret tunnel and emerged into a whole new world. Maybe I would have become invisible and ran to true safety. Maybe I wouldn't sail beyond the run.