My Time Among the Muggles: The Price of Learning to Fit In

In my time among muggles, I spent decades hiding my “other life”—my life as a spiritual being. I remember being terrified as a child that my mother, who was a therapist, might put me in a “funny farm.” I made my big brother promise he would never let that happen. Poor guy. He was worried about me too. I was always strange: a full-blown flower child who thought the world existed so that people could share with and support one another. For decades, I was somehow able to live that way and create that kind of world around me.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how I managed not to get robbed, killed, raped, or swept into any number of other adventures as I wandered through life trusting almost everyone. I hugged the wrong people. I had no sense of danger, even when guns were pointed at me, and I remained certain that justice would eventually prevail. My brother once said to me with great exasperation, “Not everyone here is your friend!” I was like a golden retriever, expecting a pat on the head, a hug, or a treat from every person and every situation. As life went on, I began to realize that I lived in a world most people could not see or perceive. When I entered the professional world, Earth became a sadder and lonelier place for me. I was repeatedly rejected for being “different,” and I had to learn to pass as a muggle.

Many people who are sensitive, gifted, unconventional, neurodivergent, culturally different, or simply more perceptive than those around them learn some version of this. They study the room before they speak. They listen carefully to determine what everyone else has agreed is real. They calculate which parts of themselves will be accepted, which will be mocked, and which might place them in actual danger. Eventually, fitting in can become a form of constant translation. You are no longer simply participating in a conversation. You are simultaneously observing the conversation, interpreting the people involved, monitoring your own reactions, and deciding how much of what you perceive can safely be revealed. This is not merely social awkwardness. It is work.

When I began doing my spiritual work publicly about fourteen years ago, I did not exactly choose to come out of the closet. My professional life had ended, and going public with my spiritual work became necessary. People who had previously considered me perceptive, intelligent, funny, and successful suddenly rejected me. At the same time, because I was living in a very closed-minded, prejudiced, fundamentalist Christian nationalist, and often racist part of California, I learned that I also had to conceal much of my ethnic and cultural background. I am still very careful about revealing certain facts about where I come from.

Being more open spiritually did not mean that every environment had suddenly become safe. It meant I had to begin making more conscious decisions about what to reveal, to whom, and under what circumstances. Coming out of the spiritual closet required me to unlearn decades of behavior. I had spent years second-guessing myself and trying to determine how a “normal” muggle would react at work or at a social event. I wanted to get along. I wanted to blend in. I struggled to make inane remarks so I could sound like everyone else. I dumbed myself down so I would not draw attention to myself.I discovered that acting stupid, clumsy, or needy sometimes made me less visible and helped deflect the jealousy and competitiveness that I often heard about years later. In addition to hiding my spiritual life, I learned to conceal my rather hefty intellect and the fact that I had earned a PhD. I was living in a community where higher education was often ridiculed as useless, elitist, or “libtard” junk information.

For years, I chose to hide both my spirituality and my education rather than continually negotiate other people’s suspicion, rejection, competitiveness, and jealousy. I still have to remain aware of this coping mechanism. My first reaction when I perceive threat or competition from another person is often to diminish myself rather than fully show up.

This is one of the hidden prices of fitting in: after enough years, the disguise becomes automatic. A person may no longer consciously decide to become smaller. The body makes the decision first. The voice changes. The intellect retreats. Perceptions are edited before they are spoken. Accomplishments are minimized. Humor is used to deflect attention. The person may appear agreeable or easygoing while privately performing a complicated assessment of risk.

Some people learn to survive by becoming impressive. Others survive by becoming invisible. Some become entertaining, excessively helpful, confused, helpless, or endlessly accommodating. These behaviors may be described as personality traits, but they can also be intelligent adaptations to environments in which showing up fully has repeatedly brought punishment. Many people thought I was strange, partly because my attempts at acting normal were not especially convincing. I might know that something was about to happen—an accident, an argument, a betrayal—or sense that an animal was in pain or that someone’s spouse was cheating. Yet I often could not say anything.

People, especially religious people, including New Age religious people, would accuse me of being judgmental. Some would even suggest that I had caused the negative event by speaking about it. Yet no one accuses the weather reporter of causing a storm by predicting rain. I had to work hard to tell white lies and go along with the muggle interpretation of whatever situation was unfolding. When what I sensed could be considered “positive,” people sometimes accepted it. However, my understanding of positive and negative is often very different from the muggle understanding. What is spiritually beneficial may not look positive on the earth plane, particularly while it is happening.

I learned to listen carefully to how other people were interpreting a situation so that I could match my comments to their version of reality. This may resemble what life is like for some people called neurodivergent, particularly those who receive, notice, or process far more information than the people around them recognize. Similar challenges also occur in cross-cultural situations, although white Americans rarely seem to consider that perspective. The person outside the dominant culture is usually expected to learn the customs of the dominant group. The dominant group rarely realizes that its customs are customs at all.

I worked very hard to acquire “appropriate” social skills as I became a professional—a professor, associate dean, department chair, and corporate trainer. I had to learn how to have a conversation with someone I knew was an active drinker while pretending that this was not obvious. How do you compliment someone on their supposedly wonderful marriage when you know the marriage is in serious trouble? How do you work for a boss who lied about having the PhD required for his position and then abused his subordinates? I learned to make jokes. I learned to keep my mouth shut. I learned to isolate. When a situation became too overwhelming or painful, I moved on.

There is a cost to spending years in this kind of divided awareness. A person may become highly skilled at reading other people while losing contact with their own natural responses. They may be able to sense danger, dishonesty, pain, or conflict immediately, yet have no confidence in their right to respond to what they perceive. They may become so accustomed to accommodating other people’s realities that they can no longer tell when accommodation has become self-erasure.The goal, however, cannot be to blurt out every perception, ignore social realities, or expose oneself indiscriminately. Not every environment is safe, and not every truth needs to be spoken. Healthy authenticity is not the absence of discernment. It is the ability to remain connected to oneself while choosing consciously what to express, what to withhold, and when to leave.

There is an important difference between privacy and shame, between discernment and disappearance. Privacy says, “This part of me is valuable, and I will decide where it belongs.” Shame says, “This part of me must not exist.” Discernment considers the situation. Disappearance assumes that everyone else’s comfort matters more than one’s own existence. In this era, honesty often appears to be considered a worse character flaw than being a drug user or a con artist. We live in a shame-based culture in which secrets are carefully cultivated and appearances vigorously defended. How can anyone progress spiritually—or sustain a close friendship or relationship—while spending 80 percent of their energy constructing camouflage to conceal secrets and shame? How close can two people become when their lives are organized around hiding what they are afraid to feel, acknowledge, or reveal? How can Spirit enter someone’s life or offer guidance when that person is so ashamed that active dishonesty has become a way of life?

I find this profoundly lonely. I am often unable to relate directly to people because I am expected instead to relate to the cover-up. I am asked to become complicit in the concealment so that no one’s feelings are hurt, even when protecting those feelings is being placed above spiritual growth, truth, or emotional closeness. It is an exhausting form of self-censorship, supposedly necessary to “get along” with people and fit into the world. Apparently, it is not like this on my home planet. My actual life, when I am not paying bills, picking up horse poop, or pulling animal fur out of my nose, is a journey through inner currents. It is populated by the fabulous furs who grace my life, along with Spirit Guides, Nature Spirits, and Energetic Beings who are part of my family.

Once my spiritual work became public and I was officially out of the closet, I had to learn how to be myself again. I had to learn not to be so affected by the reactions of muggles shaped by religion, prejudice, shame, and fear. These years of living openly as a spiritual being have helped me develop an inner terrain in which I no longer have to pretend to be a muggle. I do not have to diminish myself intellectually by pretending I am not smart, nor do I have to automatically support shame-based behavior simply because everyone else has agreed not to mention it.

It has been difficult. I have had an enormous amount of unlearning to do. I have developed greater personal courage, and I am becoming better at refusing to diminish myself in order to survive the muggle world—or to make someone else feel comfortable enough that they will not attack me out of jealousy, ignorance, or fear. This does not mean I show every part of myself everywhere. It means I am learning to make those choices from self-respect rather than reflexive fear. I can recognize when silence is wise without pretending I have nothing to say. I can recognize that someone may not be able to understand me without concluding that I must become less understandable. I can remain aware of the muggle world without allowing it to become the final authority on who I am.

The experiences I gained during my muggle years now allow me to help other sensitive, gifted, and mystical beings who are hiding in human form. I understand the vigilance, the second-guessing, the loneliness, and the exhaustion involved in translating yourself constantly for people who may have no idea that translation is occurring.

My work is not about encouraging people to become reckless, indiscriminately revealing, or oblivious to ordinary human realities. It is about helping them remain safe without disappearing. It is about learning how to participate in the world without automatically abandoning the perceptions, intelligence, sensitivity, and spiritual reality that make them who they are.

Private sessions offer one place to do this work. Group meditation can provide another. A well-held group allows people to experience being with others without having to perform, explain themselves constantly, or pretend to be less perceptive than they are. For some, it is an opportunity to learn how to show up more honestly. For others, it may be the first time they have been in a room—physical or virtual—where their inner life does not automatically make them the strangest person present.

Meditation in a group is not only about becoming quiet. It can become a place to notice the moment one begins to hide, accommodate, entertain, overexplain, or disappear. Over time, participants can learn to stay connected to themselves while remaining in relationship with other people. They can practice speaking when there is something real to say, remaining silent without vanishing, and allowing themselves to be seen without making visibility into a performance.

We do not need to become muggles in order to live among them. We do need discernment, boundaries, humor, practical skills, and places where we can remember what it feels like not to translate ourselves every moment. My work is to help people develop those capacities: to live in the world without allowing it to define them, to remain safe without becoming invisible, and to be in the muggle world without becoming entirely of it.

Journey On

Dr. Marie

Life Path Healings