The Awakened Journey

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Coming out as Someone Who's Awakening

On the courage it takes to say, "Something has changed in me."

26 June 2026

There's a moment that comes for a lot of people moving through a spiritual awakening — not the moment the awakening begins, but the moment you realize you might have to tell someone about it.

And for many of us, that moment is quietly terrifying.

Not because what you've experienced isn't real. Not because you doubt yourself — or not only that. But because you've looked around at the people in your life and you're not sure who has room for it. Who will listen without reaching for an explanation that closes the door. Who won't look at you a little differently afterward.

I know that moment. I lived inside it for a long time.

The first person I told

After my aortic dissection in August 2021 and the months of recovery that followed, I began experiencing things I couldn't explain — synchronicities, energy sensations, perceptions that arrived without invitation and stayed without apology. I needed to understand what was happening. And I needed, more than anything, to say it out loud to someone who wouldn't flinch.

I went to my father first.

That wasn't a random choice. When I was a child, my father and my late step-mother introduced me to what I'd call the esoteric world — Wicca, shamanism, a worldview that had always made room for the unseen. So when I came to him with what my doctor had said about my soul casting a shadow over my right eye, he didn't react to me strangely.

He listened. He had language for it. He told me about attunement — the idea that what I was moving through was a kind of inner alignment, a process of coming into harmony with something I'd perhaps always carried but hadn't yet fully heard. He connected it to the shadow over my right eye, to perception, to the way most people move through the world with a certain fogginess that keeps the full picture just out of reach. He mentioned Carolyn Myss. He was, as he had always been, completely unrattled by any of it.

That conversation was a gift I didn't know I needed. Not having to first convince someone that the experience was real. Going straight to: here's what this might mean.

The friend who already knew how to listen

The next person I told was my closest friend, Paul. I didn't hesitate with him. Paul is deeply spiritual — grounded in his Christian faith, and also genuinely open in ways that faith sometimes makes possible. He connects to what's beyond the visible world on a regular basis, so what I was describing wasn't foreign territory for him.

What I remember about telling Paul is the ease of it. The sense that I could say the full thing, not the careful, edited version. That kind of conversation — where you don't have to manage the other person's reaction — is rarer than it should be.

The person I didn't tell

And then there was my husband.

Which still strikes me as one of the stranger ironies of those years. The person I share my life with was one of the last to know — not because our relationship lacked closeness, but because I had learned, over time, that certain parts of my interior world needed to be protected from his response to them. My husband places religion and spirituality under the same umbrella, and his relationship to that umbrella is not a warm one. To share something this significant, this tender, with someone whose default is skepticism shading into dismissal — I wasn't willing to do that to the experience. Or to myself.

So I held it.

For years, I held it.

He noticed changes in me that he couldn't account for. And I was aware that he noticed. There were things on both sides that wanted to be said and weren't. We moved through it in body language and silence — a mutual, unspoken awareness that something was being concealed, and a shared, unspoken agreement not to cross into it.

That particular loneliness — the kind that lives inside a home, between two people who know each other well — is one of the harder ones to describe. But I think many people reading this will recognize it without needing much description at all.

What I was really looking for

In the beginning, what I wanted most wasn't someone to celebrate what was happening. I wanted to understand it. I wanted to find information, read accounts, hear from people who had been somewhere similar — anything that could help me verify that what I was experiencing wasn't just a figment of my imagination.

I was looking for validation. For acceptance. For proof that I wasn't the only one.

I was also, honestly, afraid. Not of the experiences themselves, but of what people might think if I talked about them openly. Of being considered strange, or unstable, or too much. I know what the world can do to people who are different. I'm a sensitive person, and I don't carry unlimited faith in how people treat each other. So I was careful. I was selective. And sometimes the internet felt less like a resource and more like a place where the wrong search could leave you more unsettled than when you started.

What helped me most, in those early months, were books. Published ones — accounts by people who had gone through the trouble of writing something considered, something that had been held to some standard before it reached me. The first book I read in full was Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson. It was the beginning of finding my people — not in person, not yet, but in the pages of someone else's honest account of their own experience.

That mattered enormously. More than I can easily explain.

On coming out

I've thought about the phrase coming out in relation to this, and I think it fits — not perfectly, but meaningfully. Because what it requires is a particular kind of courage. Once you speak your experience openly, especially in a public space, you make yourself available to scrutiny. You can't take it back. You're standing in something that not everyone will understand or respect, and you're asking the world to receive it as real.

I have a lot of hesitation about that, still. I know what people are capable of when faced with something they don't understand or don't like. At the same time, I believe that sharing this story will help someone. I believe in the relief of being in a room — even a virtual one — with people who share something essential with you. Birds of a feather.

That belief is what keeps me writing.

You don't have to do this alone

If you're reading this and recognizing yourself in it — if you're carrying something you haven't said out loud to anyone yet — I want you to know: I understand what you're going through.

One thing that helped me enormously in the early days was journaling. Putting my own words to what I was experiencing, privately, before I brought it to anyone else. If you're looking for a place to start, the Awakened Journey Journal was created for exactly this — to give you a structured, gentle space to explore what you're moving through, at your own pace.

And when you're ready for something more — for the company of people who are navigating something similar — the Awakened Journey Collective is here. It's a space where you can share your experience, or simply observe and read others'. There's no pressure to perform your awakening or prove anything to anyone. You can arrive as you are.

Grounding through meditation can also help when things feel overwhelming.

If something here resonates — or if you have your own story of who you told, and who you didn't — I'd love to hear from you. Use the contact form below.

You found your way here. That's already something.