A Paperback Book- "The Looking Glass" Coming Soon
Prologue
I Am the Looking Glass
There was a night I sat with a YouTube video opened in my phone; on my lap — not one of the folklore videos or an Ethiopian Bible Chapter. I had been collecting for nearly a year, but something simpler in all my learning, all my lived experience; a short but deep piece on the shadow work of the empath, so much more in the spiritual realm. It put into plain words something I had lived for years without ever having language for. An empath does not just feel what other people feel. An empath absorbs it — takes in what is dark and unresolved in someone else, holds it, sometimes neutralizes it, without either person ever fully realizing an exchange has taken place. And when the person on the other end of that exchange is still unhealed, the piece said, they do not always experience being met that way as a gift. They experience it as a mirror. And people do not always thank a mirror for what it shows them. Sometimes they turn on it, instead. Just like many times had happened to me.
I put the phone down and sat with that for a long time, because I finally understood every conversation I had ever had that ended with someone I loved accusing me, out of nowhere, of something I never felt, never was, never did — a burden handed to me mid-sentence, as if I had asked to carry it. I had spent years wondering what was wrong with me, that people kept doing this. That night I understood that nothing was wrong with me. Something was being reflected, and I was the surface it was landing on.
I thought, too, of a line I had read once, long before I had any framework for any of this: I am not how you see me. You are how you see me, or feel me to be. I had carried that sentence around for years without fully understanding it. That night, it finally made sense…
I am not the thing you are seeing reflected back at you. I am the looking glass.
I am the peace you seek.
By Mylene Lede
Author, Deliverance Minister and All that GOD says that I am
Prologue
I Am the Looking Glass
There was a night I sat with a YouTube video opened in my phone; on my lap — not one of the folklore videos or an Ethiopian Bible Chapter. I had been collecting for nearly a year, but something simpler in all my learning, all my lived experience; a short but deep piece on the shadow work of the empath, so much more in the spiritual realm. It put into plain words something I had lived for years without ever having language for. An empath does not just feel what other people feel. An empath absorbs it — takes in what is dark and unresolved in someone else, holds it, sometimes neutralizes it, without either person ever fully realizing an exchange has taken place. And when the person on the other end of that exchange is still unhealed, the piece said, they do not always experience being met that way as a gift. They experience it as a mirror. And people do not always thank a mirror for what it shows them. Sometimes they turn on it, instead. Just like many times had happened to me.
I put the phone down and sat with that for a long time, because I finally understood every conversation I had ever had that ended with someone I loved accusing me, out of nowhere, of something I never felt, never was, never did — a burden handed to me mid-sentence, as if I had asked to carry it. I had spent years wondering what was wrong with me, that people kept doing this. That night I understood that nothing was wrong with me. Something was being reflected, and I was the surface it was landing on.
I thought, too, of a line I had read once, long before I had any framework for any of this: I am not how you see me. You are how you see me, or feel me to be. I had carried that sentence around for years without fully understanding it. That night, it finally made sense…
I am not the thing you are seeing reflected back at you. I am the looking glass.
I am the peace you seek.
By Mylene Lede
Author, Deliverance Minister and All that GOD says that I am