I don’t remember when it started exactly.  I began hearing a buzz in the background that nobody else seemed to be able to hear.  It seemed to vary in intensity and at times I just wanted to scream.  When it was really bad, I couldn’t understand what people where saying over the noise in my head.  At one point my mother got angry with me because I couldn’t understand her.  I told her what I was experiencing and she immediately made an appointment with the doctor.  After several tests, the doctor could not find anything wrong.  I was probably about 12 or 13 at the time.

After that I stopped talking about it and everyone seemed to forget about it.  I think my mother assumed it went away.  I started to notice it was worse when I was around a crowd of other people.  School was particularly difficult, being constantly surrounded by a crowd of people.  After a couple years I was proficient at pushing it to the back of my mind and ignoring it, but if I got too emotional or just tired I lost control and it came on full force.  How many teenage girls do you know that doesn’t get emotional?

After a few years, about the time of my seventeenth birthday, I stopped fighting and really tried to work with it.  I started by putting myself in situations where I had differing numbers of people around me.  With just a few people around me, I was able to start discerning differences in the buzz.  I started to realize it was like having several people talk at once and with a little concentration I could focus on just one part of the sound.  That is when I got the shock of my life.  I quickly began to realize what I was hearing was the surface thoughts of people close to me.

Once I realized this I was able to develop my “ability” even further with practice.  I soon learned that touch amplified my ability to delve into another persons’ mind.  I started finding it very fascinating how people thought differently.  Some people are very visual, while others have a constant verbal dialog going on within.  This interest directed my university studies towards psychology and brings me to the beginning of my story.

I guess it is about time I introduced myself.  My name is Elizabeth Miller, Beth for short.  I grew up in a Midwestern town with a population of about 90,000 called Columbia, Missouri.  Columbia was populated mostly by very liberal and open-minded people.  I suppose it wasn’t a bad place to grow up with issues like mine.  I grew up in a typical middle class family.  I have no brothers or sisters, so it got a bit lonely at times, especially when I started hearing the background buzz.  I tended to stay home and read a lot.  I avoided crowds as much as possible.

Both of my parents worked at the University of Missouri as professors.  My father taught in the Computer Science department, while my mother taught for the Social Work department.  As you can tell going to the University was never optional.  It was always understood I would be going.

At first it was difficult attending large classes.  I started out with low grades, but as I learned to focus my ability, I found a pleasant benefit.  I was able to quickly grasp concepts from the instructors by focusing on their mental dialog.  By the end of each class I probably understood the subjects as well as the professors.  My grades quickly went up after that discovery. 

As I said, I started focusing my studies in psychology.   Somewhere along the line I decided I was going to be a psychiatrist.  I believed with my ability to delve into people’s minds, I could really help a lot of people.  The discoveries I have made in that field since my studies at the university have been rather remarkable.  Unfortunately I could not share them with anyone.

 
I am getting ahead of myself.  Let me start with an event that truly opened my eyes to the world around me.