Stuck in the Middle

Being a medium is a real headache. You wouldn’t believe what I have to listen to on a daily basis. When you have unlimited access to the spirit of every thing that ever lived, you quickly realize that they also have unlimited access to you.

I’ve tried to quit — multiple times —, but you know what they say: once a vessel of the cosmic forces, always a vessel of the cosmic forces.

A few years back, I was working in a call center. Here’s a fun fact: in every family, there is a techie, and sometimes that techie dies. And when they do, any family members unlucky enough to call me have about five seconds before their relative takes over to tell them that everything they’re doing is wrong. I was fired after only two weeks on the job.

I tried being a waitress, but all those candles were a disaster waiting to happen. That, and rodent spirits never discover that they can’t actually eat any of the food, now that they’re dead.

So, here I am, back at what I do best.

Everyone expects me to have answers. They think that just because Bob died, he’s passed into some superior state of being, and now he knows everything. But that’s not true. If it were true, then there would be no mediums; we would all be filthy rich and happy with our lives.

In actuality, the spirits of the dead are just as clueless or arrogant as they were in life. I try to avoid churches, because I don’t like wading through a crowd of ghosts who are all sure that their day of rapture is today.

When people ask me to talk to their relatives or recently-passed friends, I do my best to translate. But I have to censor a lot of material. “Oh, yes,” I assure people, “I’m sensing a profound peace in your mother’s spirit. She wants you to know how proud she’s feeling just looking at all of you.” Meanwhile, a pasty, semi-transparent woman is hurling insults at her cheating husband, and calling her son a layabout waste of good chromosomes.

For a while, I tried working with detectives to solve crimes. In my book, there are few witnesses more reliable than the murder victims. That opinion, however, is not shared by the courts of most countries. The testimony of a medium just doesn’t carry the ethos it used to.

But the worst part of being a medium is knowing that, at the end of the day, I’m not special at all. I’m just like every other middle-income professional scraping out a living. I just have more people to talk to. I still get too little sleep, have to pay off my student loans, and live with the fact that no matter how many times I say I’m starting a new diet or gym schedule, it’s never going to change.

Some days, I yearn for death. But then, I look around, and remember that even death won’t set me free.