When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was five, I had it all figured out. I was going to be a teacher, the kind with perfectly organized sticker charts, scented markers, and sparkly stars handed out like candy. My classroom (which was really just the living room) was full of stuffed animals who dutifully followed my lessons and never talked back. I had a clipboard, construction paper assignments, and big dreams of handing out gold foil smiley faces for a living. That was the plan. Simple. Sweet. Safe.

What I didn’t expect to be was… this.

I didn’t expect to grow up and become a psychic medium empath, a job title you don’t exactly find on career day posters. I didn’t expect to be someone who feels everything, who walks into a room and immediately senses who’s hurting, who’s lying, or who just had a fight with their sister. I didn’t expect to know things before they happened, or to have dreams that delivered more truth than the evening news. I certainly didn’t expect to smell cigarette smoke with no source or hear whispered messages from souls who’ve left this world but not my heart.

The shift started early, before I had words for it. My first vivid memory came when my Uncle Gary passed away. I was young—too young to explain it—but I knew he was still around. His presence was gentle but unmistakable, like a warm breeze brushing through a closed room. He didn’t speak, but I felt him. Not just in that poetic, “you’ll always be with me” way. No, I mean I felt him. It was as if he was saying, “Hey kiddo, I’m still here.” And somehow, I believed him. Not because I wanted to, but because I could feel the truth of it in my bones.

That’s how it always begins, isn’t it? Quietly. In the spaces no one else seems to notice.

Over time, the moments got louder. More vivid. A smell. A dream. A vision. A sudden burst of emotion that wasn’t mine. I used to think I was just sensitive, too soft for the world, too emotional, too much. But I wasn’t too much. I was just tuned in.

It took years to understand that being an empath isn’t a weakness. It’s a superpower. A complicated, exhausting, awe-inspiring superpower that means I’m constantly reading between the lines of conversations, of energy, of life and death. As a psychic medium, I’ve learned that the veil is thinner than most people realize. That love doesn’t die with the body. That messages come in whispers, in signs, in cigarette smoke no one else smells.

And somehow, even with all of this, I did become a teacher. I did the five-year-old me proud, with stickers and all. But the classroom is just one part of the work now. The real teaching happens in the quiet spaces, in the moments when a message from a loved one brings healing, when I help someone feel seen, or when I sit with grief and remind it that it’s not alone.

No, I didn’t expect to be this. But now I can’t imagine being anything else.

Because while five-year-old me wanted to hand out stars, grown-up me gets to help people find theirs again. And that? That’s a gift I never saw coming.