Essays

ESSOESS ESSOESS

Touched Too Early

What happens when a child with psychic sensitivity is exposed to adult energies too soon? This essay explores the psychic–sexual connection, Black girlhood, trauma memory, and the slow, embodied process of returning to truth on one’s own terms.

There are things I remember that I shouldn’t.

Not because I was too young, but because someone decided I was old enough.

I was five the first time I felt the air in a room change and didn’t know why. Six when I started noticing how certain adults looked at me—like I was already dressed in shame. Seven when I stopped telling people what I knew, because the truth was too loud and no one wanted to hear it from a girl so small.

The abuse didn’t just leave bruises.
It left questions—about the body, about the spirit, about the way intuition attaches itself to pain like smoke to fire.
When you’re touched too early, your nervous system becomes a prophet.
Your skin develops a memory before your language does.

I learned to read energy before I could read books.
I could feel danger before it entered the room.
I knew when someone was lying because my stomach would knot with a clarity I didn’t yet have words for.

And for years, I thought that made me broken.

But what I now know is this: being psychic in a world that violates girls is both a curse and a mirror.
It reveals everything people would rather keep buried—especially when the body starts telling the truth long before the mouth ever dares to.

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The first time I felt someone’s desire press against my energy field, I was maybe six.
Too young to name it, but not too young to absorb it.

It didn’t just feel wrong—it felt sticky.
Like their energy clung to my skin and burrowed itself into places I didn’t know could be touched.
It followed me.
Slept with me.
Lingered in my breath.

That’s the part no one talks about.
That energy stays with you.
For years.
Seven, sometimes more.

Sexual energy isn’t neutral. It imprints.
It transfers.
It leaves behind codes and karmas that don’t belong to you but suddenly start shaping the way your spirit moves.

As a child, I didn’t just carry my own pain.
I was carrying theirs—their unresolved trauma, their shame, their hunger.
I’d inherited contracts I never agreed to.

And because I was already spiritually open—already reading the ether, already dreaming messages I didn’t understand—I became a vessel for what had no business being housed in a girl so small.

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When a child is psychic and touched too early, something gets rewired.

You don’t just lose trust in people.
You lose trust in your own knowing.
Because your gift told you something was wrong—and no one stopped it.

You begin to question whether your sensitivity is a gift or a curse.
You start silencing the part of you that knows, just to survive the part of you that hurts.

And when you’re a Black girl, that questioning gets even sharper.

Because the world sees your body before it sees your humanity.
Because your intuition is mistaken for attitude.
Because your sensitivity is labeled as overreacting.

According to a landmark 2017 report by Georgetown Law, Black girls are perceived as more adult, more sexual, and less innocent than white girls starting as early as age five. This measurable bias does more than shape policy. It shapes perception.
It changes how we’re touched.
How we’re policed.
How we’re protected—or not.

So what happens when you are aware?
When you do know things?
When your intuition isn’t just a gut feeling, but a sensory experience—charged, vivid, terrifying?

What happens is you learn early how to hide.

You become fluent in quiet.
You fold yourself into smiles.
You stop telling adults what you see, because the last time you did, you got punished—or worse, ignored.

But your body doesn’t forget.
Your body records.
And eventually, it begins to speak back.

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There is a point in every survivor’s life where silence stops feeling like protection and starts to feel like betrayal.

Mine came slowly.
Not as an epiphany, but as a return.
To the moments I had buried.
To the flashes I told myself were fiction.
To the ache in my chest that pulsed louder every time I walked past a mirror.

I had to relearn how to trust my knowing.
Not just the visions or the gut feelings—but the parts of my body that remembered before my mind did.

Because memory doesn’t just live in the mind—it lives in tissue.
In muscle.
In breath.

Scientists now confirm what survivors have always known: trauma rewires the body.
A 2014 review in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience highlights how sensitive periods in early development are windows when experiences—especially adverse ones—can have profound and lasting effects on brain structure and function (source).
But long before I read about the amygdala and hippocampus, my shoulders were already tightening.
My breath was already shallow.
My pelvic floor was already whispering, not again.

That’s not intuition.
That’s intelligence.
Cellular. Energetic. Ancestral.

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I stopped calling my triggers “overreactions.”
I started calling them warnings.
I stopped apologizing for my sensitivity.
I started naming it as refinement.
I stopped asking people to believe me.
I started listening to the part of me that never stopped believing myself.

This is what healing looks like when you’re psychic:
It’s not about returning to who you were before the wound.
It’s about integrating the wound into your wisdom.
It’s about honoring the child who knew something was wrong—and listening to her as the original oracle.

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Reclamation, for me, has never been loud.
It’s quiet.
It’s daily.
It’s choosing to wear red lipstick without flinching.
It’s letting someone touch my arm without bracing.
It’s masturbating without guilt.
It’s standing in front of a mirror and saying:

This body is mine.
This knowing is mine.
This story is mine.

Not theirs.
Not anymore.

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I don’t believe healing is linear.
I don’t believe in closure.
I believe in return.
To the body.
To the breath.
To the beginning.

There are still days when my body locks.
Still nights when I wake from dreams I didn’t ask to have.
Still moments when a touch—too fast, too loud, too familiar—sends a ripple through the girl I used to be.

But I no longer try to erase her.
I invite her in.
I let her sit with me at the altar.
I let her speak.
And when she cries, I do not shush her.

I thank her.

Because she knew.
Before anyone taught her.
Before language.
Before metaphor.

She knew.

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Now, I write because I can’t unknow what I know.
I write because I’ve swallowed silence and spit it back up as flame.
I write because my knowing has outlived every hand that tried to take it from me.

Psychic gifts aren’t glamorous.
They’re heavy.
They’re intimate.
They are the sharp edge and the soft landing.

And yet—I love this gift.
Even with all it cost me.
Because it brought me home.

To myself.
To the ones who came before me.
To the blueprint I carry in my bones.

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They say trauma lives in the body.
So does truth.
So does beauty.
So does power.

And when I feel it rising—
that old ache, that new clarity, that remembering that doesn’t come with words—
I don’t run anymore.

I stand in it.
I speak in it.
I root there.

Because I was touched too early.
But I did not stay broken.
I stayed open.

And the knowing I carry now?
It doesn’t ask for permission.

It enters a room like prophecy.

One love, ESS xo

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