Psychic Telephone · 41
Julia
(Not sure what Psychic Telephone is all about? Check out our first and second posts for an introduction to the project.)
Julia has always felt that there are magical forces at work in this world, a lot of little magical entities. Growing up, she believed there were fairies in the backyard. And she believed in Santa. Still does. Like, that’s a real spirit. Maybe she’s the one putting the stuff in the stocking, but that shit is real.
She was about fourteen when she bought her first metaphysical book. In high school, she started messing around with tarot cards and taught herself what each card meant. Then when she graduated, she got a tarot card reading that was really, really good. It was so reassuring. That guy, he just called it. He knew a lot of shit he wouldn’t have known, there’s no way he would know. And that was a big moment of like, Wow, this shit’s real. Like, this wasn’t just made up. Because he did something, and she felt it. So then in college she was teaching herself how to use tarot cards and would do cards for people. And she was reading weird books about crystals, and stones like tiger’s eye, and the color thing, and numerology, how you can add up the numbers and they mean things.
But she had a hard time finding her people. Growing up, she got a lot of messaging, from peers and some adults, that something was wrong with her. She doesn’t know about the word neurodivergent or whatever, but she’s definitely old enough to know she’s not like most people. She doesn’t know why it is, but it’s just, she’s not like others. When she was younger, she felt very introverted. She didn’t want to look at people, didn’t want to make eye contact, didn’t want to talk to anybody. And she was a kind of in-your-face child—she can get really volatile emotionally, and really obsessive. So she was too intense, and people thought she was weird. Maybe she was, she doesn’t know. But she had a lot of experience with people being kind of like, We don’t like you.
Well, in eleventh grade she experienced a major depressive episode. So that really was a real mental health thing. And her parents got her a therapist and she took some medication. But she had some fear that she had mental illness. And she remembers in college having a lot of creative ideas that got resisted. Stuff about gender, weird gender issues. Like, Wow, when a boy does it, everyone thinks it’s great. When I do it, I’m a bitch. So that could have been some of it. She was attracted to drugs and alcohol, too, and that would freak people out. People just kept telling her she was weird, or crazy, and invalidating her.
So there was a sense of, I don’t fit in. I’m not like the normal people. Or that she was not following the group agreement. Not wanting to talk about what they were talking about. And when she moved to California after college, Berkeley Psychic Institute had these open-house events, and there was literally this little newspaper that they put out and their big headline was, You’re not crazy. You might be psychic. And that was like, Oohhh. When she saw that headline, it was just, a relief—like, Maybe I’m not crazy.
As time went on, she does think her mom sort of got behind it a little, and had some pride about it and maybe told friends. Her dad never seemed into it, but then he’d say, I was traveling and I saw a tarot card reader. So it was like, Oh, you’re paying attention. But even now she doesn’t think he thinks of it as a legitimate practice, or—who knows.