Born Awake: A Childhood Between Worlds

My Dear Stranger,

I don’t remember a time when I felt ordinary.

From the very beginning, I arrived quietly,

weird, distant, painfully shy,

as if I entered this world already knowing that I did not quite belong to it.

They called me sensitive.

Some called me strange.

No one ever said gifted, but deep inside,

I knew there was something different,

something heavy, something sacred,

something I did not yet have language for.

I learned survival skills early.

Long before childhood was supposed to teach me how to play,

It taught me how to endure.

I grew up before my time.

Not because I wanted to, but because I had no other choice.

Words never obeyed me.

They lived fully in my mind,

clear and complete—

but somewhere between my thoughts and my mouth,

They disappeared.

Lost.

As if the world stole them before I could speak.

My Dear Stranger,

People terrified me.

Not because of what they said,

But because of what they didn’t.

I could feel them.

Their unspoken thoughts.

Their hidden intentions.

Their quiet judgments.

Daylight was frightening.

Because daylight meant people.

Eyes.

Expectations.

I walked everywhere, looking down—

on the floor, at my shoes,

at nothing at all—

because looking up felt like an invitation

to be seen,

and being seen felt unsafe.

I never dared to meet anyone’s gaze.

The ground became my shelter.

My Dear Stranger,

Daylight was a challenge.

But the night was no kinder either.

When evening came,

when the sun began to fade, and the air shifted,

I heard them.

Another voice. A different kind of voices.Louder than ever.

Voices that did not come from the same world. Not this world.

The energy would change, heavy and thick,

pressing down on my small body,

too much for a child to hold.

Nighttime was my battlefield.

Darkness didn’t bring rest.

It brought loneliness so deep

It felt like I was the only soul left alive.

The energy shifted. The voices grew louder. The shadows multiplied.

Presences appeared,

uninvited, persistent, watching.

They disturbed me.

Reached for me.

Pulled at me.

Sometimes it felt like they wanted me to cross into their world.

Sometimes it felt like they simply wanted to remind me that I was not alone,

even when I desperately wanted to be.

I fought them in silence.

Wrapped in my blanket,

I hid like a wounded animal, begging, praying,

pleading for them to leave me alone.

On good nights,

I slept before morning came.

On bad nights,

I sat there, awake, watching my surroundings,

shaking, sweating, frozen,

until the sun finally rose.

And when daylight returned,

I felt safe again, from them.

But not from people.

Every day, another battle.

Every night, another war.

I kept asking questions,

What do they want from me?

Why me?

My Dear Stranger,

Why can’t I be like the other children?

Why do they seem normal… and I am not?

I watched them play.

Laugh.

Live freely in a world that feels like rejected me.

I didn’t understand who I was,

only that I was different—

and that difference felt like a burden

I carried alone.

Nobody told me anything.

Nobody knows.

My Dear Stranger,

I didn’t know by then

that this was the beginning of a spiritual journey.

That the thing that frightened and haunted me the most,

was also the thing that marked me.

I didn’t know that surviving my childhood

was already shaping me into someone else—someone stronger, someone older, someone colder.

Someone meant to walk paths unseen.

I was just a child trying to survive a world that felt too loud, too heavy, too alive.

And every night,

as I fought battles no one could see,

I whispered the same question into the darkness.

Who are you?

Why me?

Who am I?

What do you want?

I am still searching for that answer.

But at last now I know,

That I was never broken.

I was just born awake,

in a world that sleeps.

Your stranger,

Vie