The Awkward Psychic

I’ve written an entire book on astrology. It’s too bad I’m a little scared of it

Photo by Ioana Cristiana on Unsplash

Last spring, I was rushing through the city to meet a friend for lunch, pausing every few feet to hammer out a text to my husband. I furiously pecked at the screen, demanding that he immediately delete all footage from our home security camera. I had discovered that morning that the camera had been accidentally bumped so that it faced the interior of our home instead of the intended outside parking lot. Which meant I had been quietly filmed for days—if not weeks—without my knowledge, and my mind reeled with the potential embarrassments caught by the tiny lens.

Sure enough, when my husband reviewed the footage, he discovered a scene of me, all alone, quietly folding laundry. Then, without fanfare, I stood, took off my pants, and attempted the dance sequence performed by Milchick in the season finale of Severance.

Like anyone who discovers that what was believed to be a private, personal moment was actually available to be rewound, re-watched, and guffawed over by an entire Google support center, I was outraged.

As I stood in the weak afternoon sunlight, fuming over why I ever married a gadget-happy tech nerd, I suddenly felt what no one ever wants to feel on a street corner of Manhattan: someone touching me. I let out a bloodcurdling scream before quickly whipping around. An elderly woman in a parka peered at me.

“Your color is lavender. And you hold all of your power in the left side of your body,” she croaked.

An eccentric greeting even by New York standards. I normally would have been on my way, but I was intrigued by the lefty part. I am indeed left-handed, though I doubt anyone who’s ever witnessed me attempting to use scissors or a spiral notebook would describe it as “powerful.”

“I’m a psychic,” she continued. “I don’t normally do this…but your energy…it fascinates me.”

“Oh!” I nodded enthusiastically, despite feeling my usual twinge of unease at the mention of soothsaying.

She gazed at me intently. “You also suffer from anxiety.”

I nodded again, somewhat less impressed. The way I’d screamed bloody murder upon her lightly tapping my shoulder might have been a tipoff that I wasn’t the most relaxed of individuals.

“And…” She leaned closer. “Your name will go global in the next three years.”

Global?!? I blinked. For what? My mind raced, immediately landing on either “killed in incredibly weird way” or—perhaps far worse—“leaked Milchick dance.”

But she couldn’t tell me for what. The vision…it wasn’t clear. However, if I were to follow her back to her psychic office, she could definitely tell me more, and for a very reasonable price.

My city sense finally blinkered back on.

“Ah, no thanks! I’m good!” I smiled before hurrying myself and my lavender-hued aura across the street.

I have what I would describe as a rather complicated relationship with divination. I grew up very Catholic and was raised on saints and signs and The Omen. (“It’s all for you, Damian!”) Magical thinking was wound into my world-view from a very young age. While this isn’t necessarily the worst thing (who doesn’t like a bit of magic?) it also isn’t the best thing if, like me, you struggle with anxiety. Or if, also like me, you carry with you the faint whiff of OCD. (Similar to the whiff of gas I’m sure I can currently smell from my stove.)

I fully understand the allure of forecasting the future. Who among us doesn’t wish for a crystal ball? Especially right now, when the world seems ever teetering on the edge of collapse. Whatever one’s belief system, I think we all long for some sort of map to GPS us through the chaos. And yet, be it horoscopes, tarot cards, or a Magic 8 Ball, I’m still most comfortable with a fortune that comes tucked in a cookie, where I can tack on a humorous “in bed” at the end. I have simply spent too much time (and co-pays to therapists) learning how to put my faith in facts rather than my fears.

Which is why it is rather hilarious to me that I have now authored an entire book on astrology. Because I have. Though my book is a humor book (All Toddlers Are Scorpios) and not an actual guide. It’s intended to make the reader laugh, not help them use Mercury in retrograde as an excuse not to toilet train. Even still, before I wrote it I knew I needed to educate myself, and so ordered stacks of astrology books for research. Prior to that, the only resource I owned was called Sextrology, which I had skimmed only once 20 years ago, back when I first met my husband. (The book claimed that, as two Sagittarians, sexually we were “the stuff of which legends are made.” Which at the time we were rather smug about. Though thinking back on it, I realize they did not specify which legend they were referring to. (Loch Ness? Slender Man?)

Doing a deep dive into astrology was a bit of a strange experience for me. As I said, I like to hold prognostication at an arm’s length. Not because I adamantly just don’t believe we have the capacity to peek beyond whatever fluttering veil exists between us and the future. Rather, it’s because I sometimes do. And it freaks me out a bit.

Once, back in high school, when I was tooling aimlessly around town with my boyfriend—my first love—we passed a sign for a psychic.

“Want to try it?” He grinned at me.

As I was always eager to do something in our tiny Indiana town that didn’t involve either a Denny’s or rolling old tractor tires down a hill, I eagerly agreed. He quickly pulled his mom’s Chrysler into a parking space and we entered the musty storefront. When the psychic asked whose future she should tell, we decided on Jeremy’s. He was starting college the next year, and his future felt much more imminent and interesting, whereas I still had a year of high school left.

I remember very little of the visit. What the woman looked like. What was said. Except for one key moment: Before starting, the psychic paused and asked us if there was anything we didn’t want to know. I suddenly blurted out: “Nothing about when he might die!”

Jeremy laughed, while I blushed. My response to her question had surprised me. Jeremy was a healthy, handsome 17 year-old, and his death wasn’t something I consciously worried about. The psychic simply nodded at me, before commencing murmuring various vagaries about Jeremy’s future, none of which I can now recall. But two years later, Jeremy would die. Very suddenly. The memory of us sitting in that storefront with its dusty little curtains floated back up to me like a ghost. What rattled through my brain wasn’t my fear of the psychic…but a fear that I was psychic.

There is actually a belief among my friends that I possess some psychic abilities. Over the years my supposed powers have sometimes presented in heavy, heartbreaking ways, such as with my boyfriend. But most of the time they veer toward the ridiculous, and my friends don’t just call me psychic, but rather: The Awkward Psychic. So named for my uncanny ability to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. Some examples: One time at a party I watched as a stranger repeatedly struggled with opening a bag of chips, his hands bumbling and fumbling. I leaned in to joke: “What are you, a sculptor?” To which he looked at me in sheepish surprise and said, “Yes, actually. I work with marble.”

I was also once at a job where someone mentioned a serial killer who was in the news, and I turned to my boss and joked: “That’s your dad, isn’t it?” Seconds later I was pulled aside by a co-worker and informed that my boss’s father was in fact in prison for murdering someone.

And once at a friend’s book launch, while the author was being lauded for her success, I turned to her husband to include him in the conversation. I jokingly asked, “And do you have a job?” He blinked at me, while his wife sputtered: “He’s uh…between things at the moment…” The husband then made a beeline for the drinks table, while I debated making a beeline into oncoming traffic.

Some might simply call these interactions: “putting one’s foot in one’s mouth.” Or “being a thoughtless dope.” Some might also say: “Maybe let’s stop with the jokes.” All of which is fair feedback. But it’s the strange specificity of my comments that fascinates my friends. This isn’t just me looking at a woman’s stomach and congratulating her on a baby bump that is actually just burrito bloat. This is me looking at a woman’s stomach, congratulating her on a baby bump, joking that she should name the child after me, then learning that Johanna is the name of her OB-GYN who was recently run over by a train.

My friends think I should learn to harness my intuition, and they sometimes give me books with titles like Psychic Awakening: A Beginner’s Guide, or How To Talk to Your Spirit Guides. All of which I kick beneath my bed.

Recently, for my birthday, a friend gifted me a tarot reading. It was over Zoom, and the woman spent a lot of time telling me I seemed “pushed down by the patriarchy.” Which right now kind of feels like telling a woman, “You look like you breathe oxygen.” But she also told me one of my spirit guides was Hermes. I momentarily felt confused, as I thought she meant the luxury brand, and I imagined my guiding forces as a purse or scarf that I can’t afford. But then I realized she meant the messenger of the Gods. She continued to explain Hermes’ influence on my life, but my mind was already drifting away, wondering if “Messenger of the Gods” was how I should start signing off my emails.

Back in my thirties, when I was living in Ireland, I once pitched a piece about psychics to a local newspaper. In hindsight I think it may have been some sort of subconscious, half-assed attempt at immersion therapy, like those people who have a phobia of bugs and so climb into a bathtub of centipedes. The paper paid for me to take a train to Cork and have my fortune told by people named Cathleen and Ciaran and Caoimhe, all of whom forecast my future with a delightfully charming lilt. They also all told me radically different things. That I’d have five children. Three children. No children. That I would move to the desert. The sea. The suburbs.

When I arrived back in Dublin, I was exhausted and starving, but was supposed to have drinks with a woman I was hoping to befriend. She kept buying us pints, and at the end of the night I drunkenly stood, threw a handful of 5 cent Euro on the table, then stumbled out the door mumbling to myself about mystics. I didn’t need a psychic to tell me I would never hear from this woman again. Or to tell me I shouldn’t try to keep up with the Irish when it comes to drink.

The next day, through my fog of a hangover, I video called my mother to regale her with my psychic adventures, smugly offering up all of their contradictory readings as proof that they were all charlatans, and that there was not, in this life, any magical or otherworldly force for us to grasp on to. There was no guide, no map, and we were all, in the end, at the whims of whichever way the wind blew.

She listened to my rant, then gently smiled.

“Or maybe,” she said, “some of them are charlatans. We just don’t know which ones.”

Johanna Gohmann has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Cut, and The Wall Street Journal, among many other places. She is the author of All Toddlers Are Scorpios – An Astrological Guide to Your Adorable Tiny Terror.