How I Lost My Super Powers
I know what you’re thinking. People don’t have super powers. But some of us really do. I know I did, then I lost them.
If you ask my friend Steve he could back me up. Or better yet, ask my ex. He’s the reason I lost my powers in the first place. He’ll deny having played any part in the demise of my powers, but that was what he was good at. Denial.
Discovering My Gifts
When I was younger and still living with my family my powers were just a part of who I was and I didn’t know that they were in any way special. I heard heartbeats in the wall between my room and my brother’s that no one else could hear. I felt what I called personal earthquakes. Vibrations in the ground that I could feel by touching a table or while I was sitting in a chair. The quaking could be violent sometimes, but those around me could feel nothing when I asked them to touch the same area. The only person who believed me was my mom. Even with all her faults and horribleness, I could always count on her to believe me when I told her something was happening.
The one big quake that I’ll always remember was when I was at an Italian restaurant (ironically) with my parents. It was November 1980. I grabbed the table to brace myself. I thought I was going to be thrown from my chair. My mom just stared at me. She looked at me and asked “earthquake?”. I could only nod and say “a big one”. On the news the following day we heard that there was an extremely powerful quake in Italy. It left almost 2,500 people dead, at least 7,700 injured, and 250,000 homeless. If my mom was only humoring me before, that moment changed the way she saw me.
A couple of years before the earthquake episode I was taking a shower. There was a severe thunder storm outside with lightning all around. All of a sudden there was a huge crack of thunder and all the lights in the house went out. In the dark, still in the shower with the water running, I heard a growling in the wall. To say I was scared doesn’t begin to describe it. As the growl grew louder, I was paralyzed with fear and couldn’t move. At that moment a blue flash came out of the showerhead. Like a giant’s hand the light slapped me and knocked me to the shower floor. I think I screamed. On the shower floor, unable to get up, I heard the growling again. All I could do was lay there as another flash came out of the showerhead as my mom came running into the bathroom.
In the world of lightning strike survivors, there is the theory of wet strikes and dry strikes. A wet strike allows the current to travel in the water on the surface. Since I was naked and in the water, the current didn’t enter my body. It remained on the surface, but still affected me. A dry strike is not good. The current will tear into the body of the person being struck and come out somewhere else tearing another hole as it exits doing a lot of damage as it travels. Some survive, and some don’t. My brother never believed what happened to me that day. Saying that my mom fed into the lie. But it really did happen and I don’t care if he believes it or not.
Intuition and Dreams
I had dreams that would come true. I was spending the night with my boyfriend at the time, J. The phone rang and he answered it. It was someone inviting him to a party. Since that was what we did a lot, go to parties, of course we would go. When he hung up I told him about the dream I had just before we woke up. I dreamt that the phone rang and we were invited to a party. I described the room as having a rocking chair next to a sliding glass door. I also said that there was a blond girl there whom he had previously dated. He thought it was weird, but we went about our day and ventured out later to go to the party.
We walk to the door and rang the bell. A pretty blond girl answered the door. She seemed happy to see J, and we both went in. As we walked into the living room, I noticed that there was a sliding glass door. In front of the door was a rocking chair. J said we were having one drink and then we would leave. He was uncharacteristically quiet. We left the party and walked to the car in silence. Once in the car he said that the room freaked him out, but that wasn’t the only thing. The pretty blond girl who answered the door was someone that he actually did date.
J and I lasted a couple more years, but I started to know when he was being dishonest. Like the time he said he was going to just hang with a couple of friends and have a quiet night. Something didn’t sit right with me. I asked him what was in his pocket. He pulled out his keys. I asked him to turn around and he did so apprehensively. I reached into his right back pocket and pulled out a piece of paper with an address and directions. I didn’t pull the plug on the relationship then, but not long after I did. But he’s not the ex that caused me to lose my powers. . .
After the end of my first marriage my cousin set me up with a friend of her husband’s. I’ll call him C. He seemed great. The relationship became serious rather quickly. I’m not sure if I was rebounding or what, but we fell into a routine and just stuck with it. There were red flags from the beginning, but I ignored them. Life was exciting.
Down the road a ways I became pregnant. C was not working much, and work for me had gotten more difficult. Pregnancy and my body were not cooperating. My brain refused to work properly. I did what I could, but was ordered to bed rest for the remaining month of my term. I had constant vertigo and couldn’t do much for myself at all. I had to go stay with my family as C took a job out of state and I couldn’t live alone. I gave birth while he was away, and C returned almost a week later. He had issues bonding with our child. It was heartbreaking to see.
Several months later the dreams started. I dreamt that C was with another woman. She had long, straight black hair. He was very much into Japanese culture so I assumed the woman was Asian. I told him of my dream when I woke up. He laughed and told me I was ridiculous. I could never see her face, only her hair. It stuck with me.
He was working filming an infomercial at the time. Hours were long, and I was alone a lot. The woman who was producing the infomercial invited us to her home. She was really nice, and actually helped me get a job with a production company trying to start a new shopping network. That ended up being a nightmare, but the money was good while it lasted.
My relationship with C was extremely unhealthy. He was very critical of me, blamed me for his problems, and I wanted to leave more times than I could count. We made friends with some neighbors and it helped to have someone to talk to. Then our new friends started to have relationship problems of their own, and our friendship became strained. Around this time C wanted a change of venue. We decided to move north a bit and leave the LA area.
C started work on a miniseries and again with the long hours. He started staying on a small boat we left in the marina in LA because his work was there. He would come home on Fridays and stay the weekend before he was gone again for work. I was basically a single mom. He talked a lot about a woman on set, and would accidentally call people by her name when he was recounting stories to me, though he would say that the name was actually of an old accountant he used to have and he wondered why this guy kept popping into his head.
Another dream. . .
This one centered around the woman at work. When I woke up I knew everything. I wrote C a note. I spelled out everything I learned in my dream. It started “If I were a suspicious person, this is what I would think”. I wrote that he was actually having an affair with this woman, and he’s not talking about his old accountant, and not actually staying on the boat. I ended it by asking if I was right or wrong. He swore I was wrong, and that I shouldn’t pay attention to my stupid dreams. That’s all they are. I had never heard the term “gaslighting”, and it wouldn’t dawn on me for about a decade that this is what he had been doing all along.
The Confession
The telephone rang in the middle of the night. C answered the phone. It was the woman from work. He asked her if she had been drinking and said she couldn’t call the house. I thought it was weird, and couldn’t go back to sleep. Neither could C. He sat up for quite a long time. He finally said he had to tell me something. I said ok. He said that he had been having an affair with this woman. He had been staying with her and not on the boat. I asked him if I had gotten it right with my note. He said I had, and that he was completely freaked by what I wrote.
I regret what I did next, but I told him that I would be willing to work through it but it had to end. He was extremely relieved. I told him I needed to get away from him and went to a friend’s house. I knocked on her door at 5 AM. I crawled into her bed and her husband made us coffee. We talked and she told me I wasn’t crazy for wanting to fix it. We had a child. I had nowhere else to go, as going to stay with my family was completely out of the question.
I went back to our apartment to tell him I would stay but he needed to tell me everything. I didn’t want to learn anything new down the road, I needed to know it all, if there were others, everything. And there were others. Debbie — the informercial producer from almost 5 years earlier (she had long, dark, straight hair), and Georgia — the old neighbor. Now Leigh. I asked if that was it and he swore up and down that they were the only ones. I’ll never know but I really don’t want to know nor do I care.
All of this broke me. My dreams stopped. I couldn’t trust my own intuition anymore because I was told that my dreams were lying to me. All of this went on for about nine years. I was robbed of my powers by a liar. A cheat. I should have just left but was stupid and stayed. When I finally left my life was in pieces. It’s been about 20 years now. I no longer have my dreams, or maybe because my current husband isn’t a liar or a cheat I have nothing to be saved from. I have another super power that crops up from time to time, but I’ll save that for another story. . .
