I Was Born With My Eyes Open (My story: Part one)

I was born with my eyes open… literally. I came into the world eyes wide not crying, just looking… all around. Kinda like, I already knew something was coming and I wanted to see it clearly. I had been here before. Or maybe it was just my first time my soul has been on Earth. Either way, I was different. My birth was traumatic and I almost passed. My first unconscious memory is pain, fear, and stress. But we will get to all that a little later.

My family was military. Dad was an Army pilot. Mom was a southern woman raised on church pews and evangelicalism. Both of them loved me in the ways they knew how, which weren't always the ways I needed. We moved constantly… 13 times. New base, new school, new town, new set of strangers to figure out. The kind of childhood where you learn real fast how to read a room because your survival depends on it.

Here's what nobody in my family knew how to handle: I was doing energy work before I had a word for it.

I was the kid who could walk into a room and feel everything happening under the surface. The tension between two adults pretending to be fine. The grief a teacher was carrying behind her smile. The heaviness in a house that looked perfect from the outside. I didn't just feel it. I responded to it. I would gravitate toward people who were hurting and just... be near them. My mother took me to the mall to get my photos taken around 3 years old by her friend. The friend’s husband had passed a few years prior and she hadn’t smiled since, until she saw me. And she wasn’t my only case. People who hadn't smiled in years would smile around me. Teachers wrote on my report cards that I had "a bright light" and that I was "a natural healer." I was seven. I would rescue stranded kids in the tubes and from the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese. I have angels. And they are strong.

My grandmother was the first person to see it clearly and name it. She recognized that I could see auras… the energy fields around people's bodies. Colors, textures, movement that other people couldn't perceive. She didn't call me weird. She looked at me and said, essentially, I see you. I know what you are. But keep it to yourself. The world isn't ready for this.

She was trying to protect me. And she wasn't wrong about the world not being ready. But that instructio….. hide the thing that makes you different, keep your gifts private, don't let people see what you really are…that instruction shaped the next twenty years of my life. Because when you tell a child to hide the truest part of themselves, they learn that who they are is something to be ashamed of.

I didn't know then that I'd eventually reject that instruction entirely. That I'd build my whole life around the very thing she told me to keep hidden. That the gifts she saw in me as a child would become the tools I use to help regulate their nervous systems, process grief, move through trauma, and reconnect with themselves.

But that comes later in the story.

Right now, I was just a bright, sensitive, intuitive kid in a military family…. moving from place to place, carrying the weight of everyone else's emotions, with absolutely no framework for what I was experiencing. No language for it. No safe adult to teach me how to work with it.

And my home wasn't safe either.

I don't say that to vilify my parents. They were products of their own trauma and their own upbringing, their own unprocessed pain. But the fighting was real. The fear was real. There were times I was genuinely afraid. My mother and father would cycle through explosive conflict and stupid reconciliation… she would try to leave him, we’d be back in Alabama, then the next moment they are back together. I was in the middle of it, absorbing everything, feeling everything, understanding nothing. But I wanted to help. And I did. I would absorb and transmute their pain for them. And I still do. And I still help them to this day.

For a kid who could feel energy the way I could, living in that environment was like sitting next to an amplifier with no volume control. Every fight, every unspoken resentment, every moment of tension in the house hit my nervous system at full volume. I didn't know how to turn it down. I didn't even know there was a dial. So I learned to disscoiate. Spongebob was my my first vice.

I'm telling you this because it matters. Not for sympathy. I don't need that. It matters because this is where the healer's story actually begins. Not in a training room. Not at a certification ceremony. It begins in a house where a child learned to scan energy fields because he had to. Where reading a room wasn't a spiritual gift… it was a survival skill.

Every single one of my clients who tells me "you see things other practitioners miss"… this is why. I've been reading energy since before I could read books. Not because I chose to. Because the alternative was being blindsided by an environment I couldn't predict.

If you've ever felt like your sensitivity was a burden…or like feeling everything was a curse rather than a gift… I need you to hear me… it's not a defect! It's an ability that no one taught you how to use. And it can be trained. Refined. Turned into something that serves you and serves others.

That's what I do now. I take the thing that almost destroyed me and I use it with precision, with training, with over 850 hours of study and over a decade of hands on practice, to help people who are where I used to be.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Because before any of that could happen, things had to get much, much worse.

That's the next chapter.

[Read Part 2: "What Happened in Second Grade" →]

Andrew Young is the founder of Rainbow Reiki Center in Las Vegas…a Certified Reiki Master Teacher, trauma-informed yoga therapist, and clairvoyant healer with thousands of sessions. His practice specializes in nervous system regulation, grief support, and LGBTQ+ affirming care, and sexual abuse.