"Second Sight" by Sharon Neill

While I am occupied with Canada Reads, I like to have something lighter to turn to.
Autobiographies always interest me and I don't remember who recommended this book to me.

   Sharon Neill was born prematurely with many health problems.  Too much oxygen in the incubator caused permanent blindness.  She accepted her blindness because that is all that she knew. 
  She was born in Northern Ireland in 1969 and also accepted the rioting and bombing as just a part of her world, but when she went to college in England, she was perceived as a terrorist because she was from Northern Ireland, and she was surprised to be ostracized.
  When Sharon was five, she heard voices that seemed scrambled and confusing.  It upset her greatly and it was many years later that she was able to get in tune with those voices and recognize them as her 'spirit guides'.   At first, she fought against the strange experiences that she had and thought that she must be  crazy.  But she grew into her psychic abilities gradually. 

Sharon was very sheltered as a child and had great difficulty breaking out on her own in her twenties.  She was ripped off by many people, before she was able to get a settled life and know whom she could trust.
The ability to predict the future is not something that psychics are able to do for themselves.  The gift is intended to benefit others.
Sharon is  a spiritualist and a medium and follows the Buddhist tradition.  She believes that there is no judgement after death, but a reaping of the consequences of our behaviour in this life by a journey through different levels of spiritual evolution in the next life.

She tells how psychic abilities play havoc with the psychic's emotions because the senses are heightened and you take on all the emotions and moods of those around you.
She also told how some psychics go into a trance so that a deceased person can use that body to communicate with the living.
After a documentary was made about her psychic abilities, the police began asking for help in murder cases.  Once again, she experiences everything as she tunes in to the situation and says that she knows how it feels to be strangled, stabbed, shot and raped. However, those feelings are short-lived and she feels it is worthwhile when the case is solved.
I was surprised that, even though she is always in communication with spirits, she warns against people without psychic experience, using Ouija boards  She says that it opens communication to spirits who may seek to cause mischief with the living.

I really didn't understand everything concerning psychic abilities but I accept this as Sharon's story and I really was more interested in her blindness.
As with many autobiographies, the writing was not good, but I could see this story being fictionalized and made really fascinating.