Chasing My Demons

By Courtney Walker

I have lived a life of faith so strong that when supernatural experiences have occurred in my life, I just believed-to believe in the unseen and to know in a place deep inside that what you hear, see, or witness is the truth. How do I begin to summarize the story of my life?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781645699620

Book preview

Chapter 1

Discovery and Acceptance

There are a lot of people whom I have met along the way who think they know me. While it’s true that they know quite a few things about me, they don’t really know me. No one does, not my friends, family, husband, or kids. They may know some of the stories that I have told them, but they don’t know them all. That is because I have been afraid to tell them all up until this point. But I know now that I must, and so I shall no matter how difficult this has been. I changed the title of my book many times before settling on the title Chasing My Demons . It finally came to me because I realized that if I was going to tell my truth, then the truth is that I have been chasing my demons all these years; and I honestly tell you that this is the first time since I began to write this book that I have felt so attacked. The demons are getting stronger with their attacks, and they are coming from all sides. I don’t have to guess to know why it is because I am finally fulfilling or trying to fulfill the purpose that I have been tasked with. I now realize that I grew up in darkness. My house from the outside might have looked like all was well. But the inside was different. My house was filled with chaos and abuse; and with abuse came neglect. Don’t get me wrong. There were pockets of light, but only very few of them. What I know is when you are in the midst of chaos, it is hard to focus on anything else but that. So you focus on the chaos every moment and cannot think about what is going on around you. We did not live a normal life by any means. Maybe that was how I came to realize that I was different. I don’t blame my parents really for the darkness. I believe that sometimes we experience situations in our lives that thrust us into the darkness. From that moment on, we either are able to search for and pull ourselves out by the light or remain in the darkness and let it pull us deeper and deeper in until we no longer recognize even ourselves. Also, I think the darkness was already there before we arrived at our fourth house. I know that we were the first family to live in the house, but I do not know the history of the area before we built there. It’s important to know the history of the area where you move to and live. I say it was the fourth house because that was when I was old enough to remember more things. That is not to say that the darkness wasn’t present in the other three places where we lived. The darkness was always present. The cloud of it hung in the air, and the stench of it was all around us at every moment. Living with my father was and still is a carefully constructed ballet on egg shells. There were things we were expected to do and ways in which we were expected to behave that were not the ways of a typical family. I wish I could say that I learned to adapt, but I didn’t. That has always been one of the issues I’ve had with my family—not in the way that my family has always thought but in other ways they never thought of. Okay, so I am different. I’m not different in the sense that I moved five times while growing up even though my family was not involved in military. I am not different in the sense that I grew up with a mother and a father who are still married. I am not different in the sense that I was raised upper middle class or that the areas where we lived were predominantly white even though we were black. I am different in the sense that I feel things, and because I do, I have the ability to experience things that others do not. I have spent a majority of my life being made to feel by my family that I was too different. I was too different to fit in to what they wanted and expected of me. I wish I had known then what I know now. Then maybe I would have had an easier time growing up, because I always knew that they did not understand me really and felt that it was somehow my fault and that maybe if I tried a bit harder, I could be what they wanted and fit in. It is as the adult I am now and knowing the things I know now that I realize that I was not created that way. I was not created to fit into their mold. I am different because I was created to be different.

My husband met my family for the first time a few months after we had gotten married. It was a somber occasion even though it was Christmas. My mom had called me to tell me that my grandma had transitioned to hospice. Even though we did not have the money by any means, we still chose to rent a car and travel with the kids to Florida and see her to say goodbye. I’d love to say that we received a warm and inviting reception, but that is not true. My father was his usual chilly self I’d even go as far as to say he was downright angry that we were there at all. When my husband found out how my father had received me, he asked to speak to my mother alone and asked her, What did Courtney do? I mean, why do you treat her this way? My mother’s answer to him was simple: She just never conformed like her sisters did. That was the first time my husband gave me insight into how my mother at least viewed me—as a nonconformist. The truth is I tried very hard to fit into my family. I just never could.

Frederick Douglass said it best in his autobiography, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony I envied my fellow slaves for their stupidity. That is how I have always felt in a nutshell. I felt that I was an outsider looking in, and as I watched life mostly pass me by, I wondered why I was created the way I was. I never dreamed until now that I was created for a reason and that the purpose was not to linger and enjoy the darkness. It was to see the light and embrace the light. I never thought of it as nonconformity. But I guess like Frederick Douglass, I did not want to ever just move with the flow of what I was told was the right thing simply because I was told of it by people who had lived longer than I had, because I knew that they did not feel things the way I did and that they would never truly understand me. I mean I didn’t really understand me. I just knew I had to fight to be myself because there was a reason I was created the way I was.

Chapter 2

Enlightenment

Iwas raised a Catholic, went to mass every Saturday, and participated in all of the sacraments. I was a dutiful altar server, host greeter, eucharistic minister, lecturer, and CCD teacher for years. I volunteered with the church every chance I could. I feel I’ve had a great relationship with God since I was young. Something most people don’t know about me is that I loved being in church. I felt at peace especially in the quiet moments. I felt close to God, and though I didn’t quite have a name for it, I wanted to do God’s work and please him. Many people ask me why I changed religion a few times and what was I searching for. In fact, an old friend asked me that just the other day during a long overdue phone call. I stumbled to explain to her why I had become a Christian again after being a Muslim. She has been and remains a Christian. After a moment, I told her I was searching for a relationship with God. That seemed to satisfy her, but she had a lot of questions like most people do, like I always have. I wish my life had been as simple as choosing a religion, obeying God, and following him to the day I died. But too many things have happened to me spiritually that cannot be explained with mere religion. Believe me I have tried.

I have asked and wondered time and time again, What is happening to me, and what is wrong with me? Is this from God or Satan? Am I good or evil? I felt convicted all the time and wondered if I was being punished for something I had not known that I had done. I never dreamed in a million years that it was destined by God for me to experience all that I experienced.

So like I said before, I grew up a Catholic. For those of you who don’t know, it can be a hard or an easy religion depending on how you look at it. I felt it was easy. When I was in eighth grade, I was caught fighting at school. I was suspended from school for two weeks, and my mom set it up with our priest for me to work during that time at the church. I rode my bike to church every day, and I loved being there in the quiet of it all filing papers and eating my daily sandwich. My mother never knew it wasn’t a punishment; it was a gift. Sometimes what is designed for bad God can turn into good. I remember a few days before I went back to school, I saw the girl whom I had fought in school and we spoke for the first time since the incident. We had been best friends prior to it and could not really remember why we had fought in the first place. We agreed that it had been silly and thought that it would be great to walk into school together on Monday morning as friends again. So that’s just what we did.

When I was about seven or eight years old, I received the very first sacrament that all Catholics receive, the first communion. It is a great sacrament in the church because you have to take classes for it in order to learn the importance of it—to learn that you are receiving God’s body and blood and what it represents to you as a Christian. I was so excited to receive my first communion. I had a new white dress and a veil to go with it, plus the white gloves. Oh, I mustn’t forget those. On my big day, everything went as planned without a hitch, and I was allowed for the first time to receive the body and blood of Christ given to me by a priest who had the kindest face I will never forget. Years later after some time had passed, I was looking at books with my older sister on a bookshelf in our family room. Then I came upon a prayer card that our church sometimes gives out. I immediately recognized the priest on the front of the card. I flipped the card over to read the facts that they usually shared about the priest on the