Over winter break a friend convinced me, after some arm-twisting, to visit a psychic in Manhattan. She had always been intrigued by astrology and mediums — she is a devoted subscriber to her daily horoscope, and recently began dabbling in Tarot reading — and as her most skeptical friend, she recruited me to come along. All throughout our train ride into the city, I made that skepticism known, saying that the only thing a psychic could read was body-language for the better part of an hour.
Looking back, I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. My previous psychic experience had been limited to a palm reading on a boardwalk at the Jersey Shore — needless to say, I had little to no frame of reference. I imagined a tiny space above a bodega, with silky curtains and tapestries covering the walls, two chairs and a tiny wooden table with a crystal ball. In reality, we were instructed to tell the doorman at a glossy Midtown high rise that we were there to see Lauren. The apartment was far from the over-decorated hole in the wall that I had pictured — instead, it was furnished with a sleek leather couch and entertainment console. Rather than burning incense, it smelled like lavender and cleaning products.
I went first while my friend waited in the lobby. The reading began with the psychic addressing my apprehension — she was picking up that I was nervous or uncomfortable with the situation, and that I wasn’t exactly a believer. Most of her inferences and predictions about me were broad, but not inaccurate. She was sensing sadness in me, from a recent “separation” or loss, saw me working in a career with people and told me I would be spending my summer commuting to a Manhattan internship. I nodded along with her benignly, trying not to give too much away.
I left feeling amused, and a little ripped off. It was a classic example of the Barnum effect — the tendency to believe that general statements accurately and uniquely describe you — at work anytime you take an online personality test. As an aspiring psychologist, I was of course thrilled to hear that I would be working with people, but what career doesn’t to some extent? And it’s certainly not a stretch to assume that a college-aged person in the tri-state area would be looking for some kind of summer employment in the city.
The skepticism I felt in the practice was therefore still very much intact and I was feeling vindicated … until one of her predictions — that a past relationship would resurface, and that nothing good would come of it — came true. Suddenly, all of my long-held cynicism seemingly disintegrated. If one of her claims had been substantiated, surely I could rely on the rest of what she had told me.
There are dozens of theories — published in scientific journals or passed down colloquially — that can explain my sudden conversion. The power of suggestion is formidable, and the human tendency towards believing self-fulfilling prophecies is well-documented. While I have been tentatively returning to unfinished short stories over the past few months, I found myself searching Lou’s List for fiction writing classes with renewed zeal after the psychic suggested I should revisit an old creative outlet. I sent out a second wave of internship applications to companies in New York. And I have no doubt that it was partially her priming that made me think I should allow a long-dead flame to be rekindled.
I’ve struggled before with the idea that whatever is meant to be will be. It’s crippling to leave your life up to fate, using the predictions of a psychic or a horoscope as a crutch, however tempting their prophecies may be. When you’re feeling uncertain or discouraged, it’s incredibly appealing — even for the most skeptical among us — to grab onto any shred of hope, even if it comes from a less-than-credible source.
This time, however, there was agency behind the apparent accuracy of my psychic reading. For better or for worse, I was the one fulfilling my own prophesy, not some invisible hand of fate. With this knowledge, I can definitively say that my skepticism of any psychic abilities is as healthy as ever, but I can’t deny that sometimes a little nudge from the cosmos might be just what we need to set our own “destinies” in motion.
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