A “changeling” in folklore, is when a human child is swapped out for a faerie child by faerie folk. The faerie child is raised among human parents but shows unusual behaviors, traits, or afflictions that basically scares the human parents into participating in infanticide when they suspect changeling.
I’m being rough with the actual deep roots of the changeling tales; however, I’m sure many of you at one point or another has felt like an outsider to your family, a black sheep, or just different in some way. My parents never tried to murder me or make me feel different, but ever since I was a little girl I felt like there was something off about myself. I would look up in to the sky at night through my window and wonder deeply if I was not of this world, an alien changeling. It was almost an obsession.
I look back now as an adult nearing 30 and I can see a lot of situations that made me feel isolated and potentially “alien”. I was bullied a little here and there, but children are cruel, and I can remember instances where I was not very nice to other children myself. I do not hold any blame for kids who were probably experiencing their own terrors at home and by a larger view, I did not have a terrible childhood myself. My family was fairly functional and very loving. So where does this feeling come from and why does it still cling to me as I’m nearing my thirties?
Being an individual of sound mind, I do not actually believe aliens came to this planet to replace a perfectly healthy and normal child with an alien baby. I look so much like my mother we get confused as sisters sometimes. I know a lot of beliefs I hold are a social construct, that I learned behaviors in society that dictate the way I behave now and in the past. I also know that it is possible to unlearn negative behaviors; though it takes a lot of work. However, I’ve always felt these unusual feelings might come from another source that is heavily shrouded in mystery. Not all science has been discovered yet. Can I seriously blame this alienation I feel from humanity on society and learned behaviors and not look at other parts at play as well? It is much easier these days of psychology and science to look at yourself in a mirror and say, I act because XYZ and place labels on ourselves because science said I do not create enough serotonin in my brain to feel enough joy therefore I am depressed. Like the guts of a clock, not one piece powers the inner workings without the help of the other cogs. Together they make the clock. Apart, they are just pieces of the mechanical puzzle. Depression and anxiety may be caused by biological factors, but is the biology possibly changed by outside forces unknown?
I am not discrediting science for anything, and I believe in science! What I am trying to convey is that although scientific facts are proven and can have its results replicated over and over again, who is to say there aren’t other nuggets of preternatural workings that don’t play a part behind the scenes? I do believe my brain has an imbalance that causes my anxiety and depression, but I also believe that all humans are natural empaths and have metaphysical quirks that don’t exactly fit into the scientific spectrum that can escalate an issue.
Some are more open to these empath quirks than others and it can be extremely overwhelming for those who do. It is profound and perplexing, but by no means am I making any prolific observations that have never been explored. From an anecdotal standpoint, I do not know of any person who identifies with metaphysical workings; be it empaths, yoga instructors, witches, shamans, light workers, etc… who did not feel equally isolated from humanity somehow at some point, yet they are the most understanding and empathetic searching for human connections where they can. How is it that something that makes you feel so connected to the “collective conscious” if you will, make someone feel so alien at the same time? Is it because you got burnt on the stake back in the day, or today ostracized on Facebook, criticized by your family, friends, by your religious affiliation? Is societal rejection so intense and powerful, that your very life or lifestyle has to be threatened?
I’ll give you a little background. I was always an emotional child and would cry at the drop of a pin. A negative thought about another person, a picture of a child who dropped their ice cream, or nothing at all could set me into a deep emotional well of despair. My mother would ask me what was wrong and I’d pronounce that I was “just so sad”. I was called a “cry baby” constantly by other kids and the term even now makes me cringe. Many times there was just no “cause” to bring on the effect of me being upset and disconnected. Even now, I can be in the middle of my day and out of nowhere feel like I just witnessed someone dying. Something cries out in my brain that doesn’t belong to me and I have to mentally swat away at it like a fly. I close my eyes at night sometimes and see faces I don’t know, see places I’ve never been, feel things that don’t belong to me. I chalk it up to remembering dreams, but they don’t have the same feeling as dreams.
As a child, I would wake up and feel eyes on me from the end of my bed. It happened for what now feels like every night until I was a teenager, but it is something I tucked in the back of my mind until this year when I quit drinking alcohol. I know it happened, at least the fear happened. I can feel it even as I write. No one was there, my parents and brother were asleep. At least on our plane of existence, no one was there. Was it a ghost? Or a construct of my small mind? These are just small grains of sand when I think back to all of the “oddness” of my development. I had nothing to point at and blame and dissect in reality. Even as I reread this entire paragraph, I feel like I sound like a crazy person, but the feelings are so real. I have successfully gas-lighted myself.
Did I experience these things because of a brain imbalance? More than likely. Metaphysical and preternatural workings at play? Not impossible. Nothing is impossible, I hear. I hope. Humans are pack animals, as my therapist pointed out to me, and when we feel like we don’t fit into that pack mentality, it threatens our livelihood. She probably put it in more eloquent of words, but it stuck with me. The childhood fear of rejection, the disbelief in people’s eyes when I spoke about ghosts, and the disembodied feelings that didn’t belong to me. These were all things that caused a fear of being left out of the pack.
Coming back to the present, cutting alcohol out of my life has opened this “changeling” wound that I’ve tried to plaster over with unhealthy behaviors, denial, and self-destruction for so many years. Choosing to let that fall apart has been the best but hardest “undoing” of my life. Despite being diagnosed with multiple mental disorders and symptoms, I’m taking this time in my life to not medicate with traditional pharmaceuticals as I have in the past. (This does not mean I am saying no one should use pharmaceuticals as treatment! I am merely claiming what I think will be best for me). I do practice self-medication with cannabis, which may or may not be your cup of tea, but it seriously works for me with minimal side-effects compared to the multiple anti-depressants I’ve tried.
That being said, with knowing what I know now, and striving to learn more, I intend on deconstructing my disorders and trying not to define myself by them but rather learn from them and become more whole. I can finally accept that I feel a little deeper, think a little too much about interconnections, and experience preternatural things a little more than some, or at least I am more vocal and open about it. Silence, for me, has almost been worse than experiencing rejection and disbelief from my peers and community. At least if I am open about myself, I can say I was true. I’m done hiding.
I do not think I’ll ever fully feel like I’m not some sort of alien in society. I don’t think it is something you can cure. Being a domestic violence survivor and then becoming an advocate for survivors years later has taught me that consistently living in fear strips you of your humanity and it is an extremely difficult road to get back to where you want to be once that happens. For my entire life I feared I was not good enough for humanity and an outsider, a “weirdo”, and my ex-partner used that as a platform for his emotional terrorism. Fighting back and finding my freedom from that relationship, was really the beginning of my life and ultimately finding freedom within myself. I may have been diagnosed with PTSD from the experience, but the positive outweighs the negative from that one relationship by eons.
I’ve found a community and another family in a group of Spokane witches and pagans. You know who you are and you are loved and appreciated. The acceptance I have experienced with them has normalized the strangeness in my life and helped me feel complete. I’m now less alien. Less of a changeling.
My hope is that my writing will be an avenue for further betterment in my healing journey and it may help someone along the way. It is not always rainbows and smiles. It is not pretty. I do not claim to be special. I do not claim to know everything or have the answer. I only know what I’ve experienced and it may differ from other’s perception, but this is my story to tell…
northwestwitch 