Signs
When a rational mind met something it couldn’t dismiss
After my mom died, I started seeing dragonflies. Not occasionally. Not one or two. Hundreds. Everywhere.
I’d always loved the idea of signs from the dead. I just never thought they would happen to me. Or come from my mom.
My mom and I were not close. Or more accurately, we pretended to be. I played by the rules. I never confronted her or asked for an apology. I wanted a mom in my life that badly, so I swept it all under the rug and accepted her for the version of her I could have.
Underneath that was a truth no one spoke about. A family story everyone seemed to forget but me. I was sexually abused by a sibling when I was fourteen. I did what I was supposed to do: I told my mother. Her response left me gutted—and on my own to protect myself.
We didn’t speak of it again for years.
When she died, that truth came back. Not quietly. Not gently. It felt like it had been waiting.
I mourned two mothers. The one I never had. And the one who broke me.
And then, the dragonflies began.
It wasn’t just that I saw them. I heard her. My dead mom. Talking to me.
I wasn’t scared, but I was stunned. My rational, left-brained mind didn’t know where to put it. There was no framework for it. No explanation that held.
But I didn’t feel crazy. I felt clear. Something was happening. It was undeniable. Not something I could prove. But not something I could dismiss either. I wasn’t trying to believe in anything. I was trying to understand what was already happening.
The dragonflies didn’t feel symbolic. They felt personal. Directed. Like something was trying to reach me.
For the first time, I stopped trying to force everything into a rational explanation. I let the question exist.
What if this meant something?
Not just about where my mom had gone—but about the nature of reality itself.
The dragonflies changed how I saw the world. Not as something closed and predictable, but as something I didn’t fully understand.
That was the opening.
From there, things began to shift. The question didn’t close. It widened. It led me toward places I hadn’t been willing to go before. Toward forms of healing I hadn’t considered. Eventually, toward psychedelics. Not as an escape. As a way in.
The signs didn’t erase what had happened. They didn’t excuse the past. But they changed something fundamental. They disrupted the sense that everything was over. Final. Fixed. They opened a door.
I didn’t know what was on the other side. Only that I wasn’t willing to ignore it anymore.
So I walked through.
My memoir, My Mother Is a Dragonfly, comes out May 12, 2026. Pre-orders are now open.
I’m looking forward to your book. Thanks for sharing.
I am really looking forward to your book. Both pre-sobriety, and especially since I received that grace from “God as I understand him”, I’ve always been one to ask a lot of deeper questions. The 12 steps and good mentorship around them taught me a powerful set of simple practices along these lines. But also, as a man, for like forever, I always asked my questions from a man’s perspective. You and some other women around the spiritual community have helped open my eyes to at least try to look at how women experience the world, and how y’all experience us men, God, the good and bad, and all of it, because no one can fully heal only half of themselves.
We all have both the divine masculine and the divine feminine and, as our blessed brother Carl Jung told us, integrating both is the key to individuation, and ultimately into transcendence.
🌗🧘🏼♂️❤️🔥