I am 3 years old. In the fuzzy matutinal memories of early childhood leaking a white gold I am with my parents. I see their hands. I find myself with this inexplicable instinct to pull their hands close to my face, to rest them on my forehead, around my face, framing it, to feel their fingers fold over my head encapsulating it like a ribcage, like fern leaves, like the wooden aisled frames of a building. I do not know how to ask for this so I stay silent, as I would for many things I have felt or known. I was not a child who knew how to communicate my needs.

I had a lot of instincts like this that I did not know how to articulate. This one strikes me specifically for its almost eerie precision despite the fact that as far as I know I did not really know what Star Trek was at this point. With something I was introduced to so early in my childhood it is hard to tell exactly where things began or if I possessed signs of my kintype from before I was exposed to it. I usually take this sort of psychological approach to things, believing I simply latched onto something in fiction to process my world and eventually it became one with my identity. This is the exception. This cannot be explained by that and leads me to believe there is some other dimension to all this that I do not quite understand. A dimension that I think is very important to all of this but that I doubt I will ever truly know the entirety of.

I am ten years old. I have convinced myself that other people can read my mind. It is strongest when they are touching me, but with certain people I am close to it feels as if they have some sort of link with my mind, perceiving everything I think. There is this strange itching feeling in my head whenever it happens, impossible to really describe, unlike anything I have experienced elsewhere. A few years later I was diagnosed with OCD and I dismissed it as just an intrusive thought. I have now come to see it not as a symptom of the OCD (though it may have interacted with the OCD in some way, of course) but instead as a phantom sense. Much like how a cat therian may get phantom shifts where they perceive a tail where there isn’t one, I get phantom shifts where I perceive telepathy where there isn’t any. Before I knew what was happening it was conceptualized as mental illness but treating it as a symptom did much less to resolve it than treating it as an aspect of my kintype.

Vulcans have a multi-faceted form of telepathy. It is relatively weak in comparison to a lot of telepaths, but capable of much depth. The first and most discussed way it manifests is through touch-telepathy: the ability to read other’s thoughts through physical contact. This includes mindmelds (the hand-to-face contact I so instinctively longed for my whole life) as well as less intimate manifestations, such as the light brushing of minds in a handshake or kiss. Then there are the more long-range bonds formed between specific people, partners and immediate family members or other close individuals, hence my shifts surrounding my boyfriend or parents hearing my thoughts even from far away. Finally, there is a weak mental link between all Vulcans, barely there but strong enough to convey something big, such as an instance of mass death.

I think that treating the phantom shifts as intrusive thoughts only seemed to amplify my distress was largely because what I needed was to accept that they were real. a lot of OCD treatment in my experience hinges on slowly training your brain that the subject of your fear is not real. the meaning assigned to these thoughts is not real. this is all well and good when that is true—I am not going to accidentally shout all my personal information for everyone on the bus to hear, a fear around that is irrational—but what I needed to do was to see the phantom shifts as real. my kintype is real, my noemata are real. perhaps differently real but still real in their own way. Only by accepting the reality of the situation could I see it for what it was—a brain in some mysterious way wired for telepathy in a body incapable of it— and to see it for what it was made it a lot less distressing. With the panic of a misunderstood sensation gone, there were still other things about it that disorient me and cause me pain.

It is the loss of a sense. One no one else around me has ever had, one the world I live in can be navigated entirely without, but it is still a missing sense. Perhaps one could navigate the world just fine if they lost the ability to see ultraviolet light as it is expected that no one can see it and society is structured accordingly but it is still a loss and the silence is still crushing. The silence and the experience of something Beyond that the people around me will never quite understand. I live in strange desires and needs that I cannot truly describe to anyone.

In my Noemata Vulcans formed such close telepathic bonds with loved ones that they started to lose the divisions between individuals. A bond that lasted long enough would develop its own mental language, unintelligible to outsiders. Telepathic contact was just as important to wellbeing as physical touch can be to humans. Most people start to get weird without it. I don’t get that contact. I think that despite my sensitivity to touch I try to fill this need with a lot of physical contact. (I have a very hard time forming a friendship with someone I can’t touch.) but still there is something missing. My head leans against my boyfriend’s head and I can feel my mind instinctively looking for his but it hits a wall, finds nothing there. I still long for someone’s hands to so perfectly fit around my face, fingers finding the right spots but it is numb, there is nothing there. The longing is deep and hard to describe. I feel clumsy, isolated without it. This sense I used to navigate my world is gone and my hands are unfeeling and blunt without it.

I seem to form these sort of... pseudo-telepathic bonds with those close to me. while I can't actually read anyone's mind I seem to be unusually affected by people in my close circle. If family members are hurt or experiencing a strong emotion or even drunk or high, I feel as if I am experiencing the same sensations even though I often struggle with empathy for people I am not close to. My identity and experience of the world seem somehow entangled with these people. I feel as if they can read my mind and I lose full track of where I end and they begin. I become very unregulated if they are unregulated, upset or overstimulated, even if, like any Vulcan, I am good at suppressing the influence they have over me and appearing unaffected.

I think that if I explore this in the right way it has the potential to be very beautiful. It is a part of me and I highly value the sense of interdependence and connectivity it brings to me. I think it makes me a very sensitive person who can think about things in different ways, even if i struggle with it at times. For example, as a child I decided it was my life’s purpose to learn “everything”. That is, of course, not possible. However, as I grew up, I have come to the conclusion that I can get somewhat close to that through embracing collective knowledge. I can know and experience much more of the world if I make connections with people who know very different things than I do, who have very different experiences from mine. Through that sort of community of shared knowledge and valuing the expertise of others (while also helping other with the things I am knowledgeable about) I can live with much more knowledge than if I was trying to do everything on my own.

This feels, to me, like a milder form of the shared knowledge that would come through the telepathy of very close relationships, multiple minds becoming something new together, the widening of vision through our connection to others. The world is bigger when you have four eyes. I find myself taking up the knowledge of others into my own body, treasuring it as a part of who I am. I am a part of a community, this big breathing web of people and I feel intimately that when I pull on it, it pulls me back. I relate a lot to John Donne’s “No Man is an Island” I think it hits something about the way I think about things partially influenced by the telepathy.

I am not quite sure the best way forward with this as I am not quite sure of anything, but for everything about it that scares me I find there is something deeply wonderful about it. I stand by my constant belief that if we approach most things we are afraid of with curiosity instead of fear we will find that the thing hurting us was our fear and not the subject of it, and really whatever it is is something very beautiful indeed.