I have an inner-psychic.

She’s bad-ass.

She can tell the future, flawlessly.

She has endless predications, worst-case scenarios, and convincing stories about what’s going to happen to me and my future.

Her seemingly high-levels of efficiency haunt me hourly.

Every time she hits the ‘predict’ button on her computer, I fill with terror, lose my breath, feel flooded with hopelessness and fear, and my mind spins-out. Her predictions involve various subjects and traumas of my life—my suicide attempt being one of them.

My inner psychic has been letting me know how my overdose—and the trauma surrounding it—will happen again, and has been warning me that it’s about to, almost non-stop the last two years. It’s been exhausting, incredibly confusing but believable, and has impacted almost every decision I’ve made.

However, a couple of weeks ago, I had just stepped into a session with her, when a voice stepped in stronger than ever before, saying:

“It won’t happen again—it can’t. There’s no way it could. You’re safe. You’re okay.”

My mind and body had started their spiral into doom, panic, and blinding anxiety, but immediately, they pulled back, and things settled. There was a stillness within me.

The familiar fear no longer had a hold.

I felt calm.

This moment felt profound, because—until that point—the voice suggesting that the overdose won’t happen again, or that perhaps my inner psychic isn’t all that, has only felt like a faint whisper, drifting loosely above my head. It hasn’t been a voice I could hold hands with and feel held by, let alone believe.

But in this moment, I genuinely believed what this voice had to say.

I believed and knew with my whole body that what this voice said, was true: the overdose won’t happen again, and there’s literally no way it could.

After spending the last almost-two years crippled with such a deep and believable fear that it will and it could, and doing everything I can to prevent it from doing so, this moment felt profound. I felt a deep sense of relief, freedom, self-trust, and confidence, for the first time in ages. The possibility of not reading into my every move, felt like it could—for the first time—be mine.

Since then, it has begun to be.

I’m starting to really respect this part of me—my inner parent—and trust what she has to say is true.

The more I believe her, the more she’s here to reassure and hold me, in moments of panic.

Since my attempt, I have an internal alarm system that goes off in moments of perceived danger or threat, all based on the trauma that happened around when I overdosed: moments in which my inner-psychic is predicting the future; times when memories are triggered; moments where flashbacks show up for no apparent reason.

The alarm takes me swiftly from the present, dramatically into the past—the overdose seemingly happened five minutes ago, is happening now, or is about to happen any second.

It’s snuck in and woken me whilst I’ve been sleeping, resting, or doing, so much over the last two years.

At various points, it was almost constant—now, it’s not so much.

There’s ground beneath my feet that I can stand on whilst my body remembers whatever she’s remembering. And now the voice of my inner parent is increasingly able to take the reigns when my inner-psychic is blasting me with predictions.

My inner-psychic might be bad-ass, but she can’t tell the future, and neither can any other parts of me—no matter how hard I try, or how hard I want to.

That’s terrifying and frustrating, but I’m gradually beginning to find moments of comfort in it—I can’t predict the future, so it means I can only be with what I have now.

And right now, despite whatever anxiety is racing in my mind:

I’m safe.

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Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: Amani Omejer