When I was in 4th grade, the movie Pocahontas came out. It was summertime, and I remember seeing it with my Aunt Sara, my mom, and my sisters at the drive-in. I fell in love with every moment of that film. I clung to the words, memorized the songs, and even named the great dead tree in the back of the farmland where I grew up “Grandmother Willow.” It was a name that stuck—so much so that even my stepfather and mother began calling it that.

But my obsession with Pocahontas wasn’t just a childhood phase. It became a source of ridicule. At school, I’d sing “Just Around the Riverbend,” tell classmates I could talk to the forest animals, and weave tales about my supposed Native heritage. Instead of admiration, I got teased—mercilessly. My peers called me “Pocahontas Boy.” They mocked me for being “different,” and as kids often do with cruelty, that difference became exaggerated into a single, vicious word: “faggot.”

For years, through middle school and into high school, I endured that teasing. My name became synonymous with ridicule in our small  Michigan, community. I felt the sting of being infamous in a small town—for all the wrong reasons. Even when I left, the echoes of “Pocahontas Boy” followed me.

Now, decades later, I’m a Cowboy—a Psychic Cowboy, to be exact—and the teasing hasn’t stopped. The difference is that I no longer feel ashamed. Back then, I was a child seeking connection to something bigger, something extraordinary. Today, I live in that connection every day. As a professional psychic, I do talk to animals, as well as spirits and energies on the other side. What was once a fabrication to fit in or escape has become a truth I live.

And the Native heritage I’d claimed in stories? It turns out there was truth to it after all, at least on my mother’s side. My family name traces back to the See Wolf—or perhaps the Sea Wolf—totem. The oral traditions of my family, shaped by time and assimilation, led us to believe it was “Sea,” yet I wonder now if it might have been “See.” My grandfather's last name, Self, may well have been an Americanized version of that totem.

Even the name Riverbend, a park  where I’d spend hours as an adult, seems to call back to my connection with that story and my own past. It was there that I would hold some of my loudest “conversations” with what I thought were my neighbors. Now, I know them as something far different—energies on the other side.

Through all the ridicule and the painful lessons of those early years, I began to understand something profound about myself. I see. I hear. I connect. These abilities, often dismissed or feared by others, aren’t a disease or a defect. They are my gift. What some call clairaudience—the ability to hear voices and sounds others cannot—I call my bridge to the unseen. It’s not cancer. It’s not a curse. It’s a calling.

This is who I am: the Cowboy who speaks to animals, who hears the voices of energies past, and who steps beyond ridicule into a truth so expansive it doesn’t need validation to exist. And if my childhood taught me anything, it’s that even when you’re mocked for who you are, the river keeps flowing. You just have to decide whether you’re brave enough to follow it.