MEET LYJA
The medicine was always in me. I just had to learn to read it...
For years I was the woman the system kept failing. But the system had been failing me long before the doctors did.
I grew up with a father who was ex-military, alcoholic, and carrying his own unexamined C-PTSD - alongside the kind of narcissistic control that does not announce itself. It just slowly becomes the air you breathe. I was not a child in that house. I was a caretaker. Responsible for the emotional temperature of a grown man who should have been responsible for mine.
And yet; within that same contradiction - he gave me something no school, no institution and no mainstream education ever would.
When no one else was home, my father would train me in occult Russian practices to expand my intuition. I was five years old. He would hide objects around the house - crystals, amber stones - and time me finding them. I got so good I could locate anything in under thirty seconds. He had hundreds of compartments throughout the house from his construction work - drawers full of drill bits, screws hidden inside larger boxes and cabinets - and still, I would find whatever he concealed. Every time. Without fail.
From as young as I can remember I told my parents I was playing with a ghost. A young boy. Around seven or eight years old. Pale face. Dark black hair. I was four or five at the time and thought nothing of it - he was simply there. When my parents reviewed the footage of me playing, there was no one. Just me, alone in the room, laughing and talking to something they could not see.
It was only years later, when my brother and I finally opened up to each other, that he told me he had seen a girl too. Same age. Same pale face. Same dark black hair. We had never spoken about it. We had each carried it separately, assuming we had imagined it.
We did some research on the house; a butcher had lived there. His two children - a young boy and a young girl, matching exactly what we had each described - had died in a local town fire.
I did not grow up in a ordinary house. And I was not an ordinary child. What I could sense, feel and access from that age was not imagination. It was the beginning of everything I would eventually spend a decade training to understand.
My father's occult practices. The supernatural occurences in the house. The crystals I could locate in under thirty seconds with my eyes closed. Looking back - my gifts were being activated before I even knew I had them. In the most unlikely place, by the most complicated man, in the middle of a childhood that was taking far more than it was giving.