Finding

In my family, I act as the “finder:” Whenever anyone loses something, they always come to me to see if I can find it for them. I got so many of these petitions at one point that I finally came up with the decree that if I haven’t touched it, don’t ask me to find it.

I think my biggest coup was finding a baseball that my son had had autographed by that year’s entire Yankee baseball team hiding underneath the couch cushions in the living room, despite the fact that no one had ever played ball with such a valuable item. Ever since that time, I always tell everyone: I don’t care what item you’re missing, look for it under the couch cushions first. You?ll be amazed at what you find there.

I think it’s ironic that my family still asks me to locate things, even though I lost most of my peripheral vision after an aneurysm burst in my brain four years ago. When I first came home from the hospital, my biggest problem was finding things. I would look desperately for something I knew was in a certain location, but I just couldn’t SEE it.

Since I gained a little psychic intuition from my cerebral accident, I ought to be able to find things even BETTER than I could before. And in some ways that’s true.

Around two years after I returned from the hospital, I found myself getting “intuitions,” in the form of dire warnings, about a seemingly benign man we’ve known for many years. These were wordless; they were essentially a feeling of dread and anxiety about this person. When I shared these with Whitley, he brushed them off, saying that there was no way this man could possibly harm us.

Then this man suddenly called us out of the blue and said he had to speak to Whitley immediately. When Whitley picked up the phone, he told him that he’d had an “intuition” that I was about to have a heart attack. He also claimed to have had a similar intuition two years ago, just before my aneurysm burst, sending me to the hospital for two months.

I didn’t find this too convincing, since this man has never impressed me as someone who was particularly intuitive, and he’s certainly not psychic. Also, unbeknownst to this person, I had recently had an elaborate stress test, where you run on a treadmill with an IV in your arm and someone “reads” your heart over a computer. Our physician recommends that everyone take this test periodically, and I passed mine with flying colors. I didn’t (and still don’t) have any sort of heart disease.

I decided I would ask a good friend who really is a psychic (unlike me, I’ve just been brushed lightly with a little “shamanic intuition”) what she thought, and she told me it was a psychic attack. I later asked another psychic about this and she used the exact same phrase: “psychic attack.”

Both of them advised me to visualize white light surrounding myself and my family, as a form of self-protection, something I started doing regularly.

But maybe, like all good intentions, such as checking for breast lumps in the shower and going to the gym twice a week, I didn’t do it regularly enough.

Or maybe it’s just that while show biz is tough, the TV biz can break your heart.

When a cable network approached us a few years later about making a reality series, Whitley insisted that the man I’d had the intuitions about had to be part of it. He turned out to be about as dangerous as they come: He did something which completely ruined the pilot, so they decided not to run it.

I keep thinking that there must be a metaphor for me in here somewhere. I’ve been told repeatedly that I have everything I need, so maybe this was something I didn’t need. We WERE worried that it would take up too much of our time.

I also think I have to understand that, while I can find things out by “listening” to those inner psychic messages, I can’t expect anyone else to take them seriously, any more than I would be impressed by someone telling me that the end of the world is near. Those types of apocalyptic pronouncements almost never come true. I expect that we’ll all wake up on December 22, 2012 to find that the sun is still shining and the world hasn’t ended.

But if I have an intution about it, I’ll be sure to let you know.

NOTE: This Diary entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.