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Amy D. Penny

Amy D. Penny

Whoops

5 min readFeb 22, 2026
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To say I am “out of it” lately is an understatement. Today, I realized that the website I had my blog on closed down in September of 2025. I don’t remember seeing any notifications of that in my email, but since I seem to miss a lot lately, I checked. The last email I received was confirmation that I wanted to change my password in 2022.

2022 was probably the last time I was on there. I’d have to check back to the blogs I have saved on my laptop. It makes sense considering the direction my life has taken.

Ironically, it was in 2022 that I got a job in retail and slowly faded away, losing myself in another attempt to survive. I concluded that to stay in my job and continue paying my bills, I needed to keep my head down, keep my mouth shut and do my job.

Soon after I started, it wasn’t a surprise that for several days, in the same spot on my drive home, a fox would run across the road. The message? “Hiding in plain sight.”

I didn’t deny it. I thought it had to be like that.

Four years of hiding in plain sight have taken their toll. My job is exhausting. Most of all, masking is exhausting.

I have a couple of co-workers whom I relate to and am open with, and perhaps that is why I didn’t realize how little anyone else knew about me.

Last Friday, I met three coworkers for dinner after work. In the middle of dinner, a coworker (randomly) started talking about how she saw something online about asking deceased loved ones to send a sign and that it was best to choose something arbitrary. She chose a yellow elephant. She then went on to explain that, soon after choosing what she thought was an arbitrary sign, she saw a post on social media with a yellow elephant. She expressed that she didn’t care if we thought she was crazy because she believed it was a sign from her parents.

It was in this moment that I realized how little these three coworkers knew about me. Not so long ago, I charged people to talk to their loved ones. I have since hidden that service on my website, but I still have the gift of mediumship, whether I am advertising it or not. I have sensed, seen and heard dead people for as long as I can remember.

Two days after this comment was made at dinner, I texted this coworker and told her I had just sent Distance Healing to someone and that I used to offer mediumship on my website. I told her that if she ever wanted to talk about connecting with her loved ones, I would be open to suggesting ways to do that. My text was not, by any means, to solicit business. No, I just suddenly felt it necessary to reveal a bit of my true self to someone I felt comfortable with.

Admitting this to her was beyond my comfort zone, but that is where real change for me lies. To align myself with where I need to be, I have to move beyond my comfort zone.

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If I doubted that, yesterday, my manager at work started talking about how grateful he was for the work some of us were doing and how he’d support us if we wanted to move to different positions, even if that meant he’d have to start over with new people. He reminded us that moving up would involve moving out of our comfort zones.

I don’t have any interest in moving up in the company or even moving to a different position in another department. I want out. I want to thrive. I want to live authentically. I want to share my gifts and be appreciated for my gifts.

To thrive, I have to be paid my worth. Thriving involves a mix of productive time, creative time and downtime. I have to be doing something I love doing so that it doesn’t feel like work. No more doing work that is mundane, physically exhausting, mentally overwhelming and not in alignment with my intrinsic values and goals.

I have been applying for other jobs over the last four years. Of all the applications I’ve submitted, I’ve had 5 interviews and one job offer that was not substantial enough to consider. I’ve had people tell me after the interview that I am overqualified and that my skills would be wasted. I’ve been told I shouldn’t be working where I am working. It isn’t feedback that helps. I feel stuck. I feel depressed. I start to gaslight myself, thinking I really don’t have anything to offer the world.

How can I have so many skills and not have a better job? Why am I struggling? Why can’t I seem to move from survival mode to thriving?

The exhaustion doesn’t help. I can’t think clearly. I feel as if I dumbed myself down so much to fit in at work that the brain fog is a problem. Things are about to get worse at work, too, because they have changed the way they do scheduling. Today and tomorrow, I am off work and that marks the end of the old scheduling system. From now on, I will not have two days off in a row. That will kill me. I will not be able to recover. I’ll be off one day and be expected to go back to work the next day. The physical, mental and emotional exhaustion will kill me.

So what is the solution?

I have thoughts about products I can offer on my website and on my Etsy store. So far, though, I haven’t got the prototypes done to see if those ideas are feasible.

I have at least a dozen ideas for books, and several half-started manuscripts, though my brain fog doesn’t help the writing process.

I updated my website today, trying to make it easier to navigate. I changed how I offered distance healing sessions. If someone wants the distance healing without a detailed report, they can pay less than if I have to type out what I picked up during a session and send it via email. I figure it is a win-win. The world needs more healing energy, and this way it becomes more affordable.

I also have to admit that I am the survivor of a fatal accident and that I was convinced at the time of the accident that I was supposed to help others who have also been involved in or affected by fatal motor vehicle accidents. I believe that nothing so tragic should happen without consequential moments of soul -searching and personal enlightenment. As someone walking my talk as a spiritual healer, psychic and medium at the time of the accident, I had a different perspective than everyone else.

And so, today, I start a new blog and link it to my website…………….

TO BE CONTINUED

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