A Foot in Both Worlds

Split between the spirit world and our own, a Kansas native navigates young adulthood while holding both worlds on her shoulders. 

Light pours down from the skylights in her room while Sydney Rudd moons over a cup of tea, a mix of herbs that she praises for its healing remedies. A journal is laid across her bedspread, along with her laptop, and her cat Gabby naps in a vintage orange chair in the corner of her room under her spiritual healing certificate. 

Her house in the suburban Overland Park is silent and dark, yet comes to life when you open the door to her bedroom. Her space is indistinguishable from the rest of her home. Down the hall you’ll find a set of weights, farmhouse style decor, and you’ll catch a whiff of incense that seems to waft from her bedroom. Her existence seems to parallel her family’s.

Rudd is a 20 year old indigenous psychic medium, which bears holding the emotions of the people in the spirit realm. Not only does she communicate with the loved ones of others, she communicates with her Cherokee ancestors as well. She calls upon her spirit guides to help her make decisions. “I’m speaking to spirit,” she’ll say as she closes her eyes to look for guidance. 

The door opened to a strangers house in Lenexa, Kansas, and she’s shuffled down into the basement. The hallway downstairs was cluttered with rosaries, and religious imagery. Her next client was waiting at the bottom of the stairs for her; this is how many of her readings look like. She sits on the couch, reaches out her hands, and asks “did you lose a grandpa?” Her client bursts into tears, and then it spirals from there.  

After the reading, she flips through her journal, where her emotions go to die, or maybe live on forever. “This is my fuck page. Whenever I feel bad emotions, I need to get them out. I need them to live somewhere that isn’t in me. So they live in this journal.” The page was lined with rows of the word, and many pages came before it. It is a physical representation for how she has learned to exert emotion, and what she strives to teach to others through her work as a spiritual healer. 

The life of a 20-something still finding their place in the world is emotionally taxing enough, even with the help of spirit. She has devoted her life to becoming a spiritual healer, and has taken a completely different path than most 20 somethings do. “I dropped out of highschool, and so did most of my siblings,” Rudd said. “I’ve felt a connection to the spirit world since I was 3, and it’s what I was meant to do.”

Although she spends most of her time in her home studio with her cat Gabby, she has a home outside of home: nature. On a windy day at Clinton Park, Rudd said, "I feel connected to this land. I don't get to experience nature like this as commonly as I would like, because I live in Overland Park. I feel more at peace out here." When the trip to Clinton Lake is too far, she finds solace at Corporate Woods Park.  "They ask for me to help out," Rudd said in relation to her spirit guides. "I gain a lot from this land mentally and spiritually, therefore I help the land out in return by picking up trash and not leaving a trace." Ironically, she was stacking rocks at the time, which she considers harmless. She walked onto a premade path of rocks embedded in a creek stream, and felt the water. It was obvious that she had spent a lot of time there. 

Rudd just opened up her practices fully, and is continuing her spiritual work with clients. Yet, she still is navigating the unknown that is one's early 20s. She is enamored with her current boyfriend, has started tanning by the pool to start working on her “summer tan”, and has been obsessed with getting boba with her girlfriends as of late. She’s a psychic medium, but exists in this world as a totally normal young adult. It poses the question, how does she exist to others in the spirit realm? Hopefully, none of us will know anytime soon.