Psychic Telephone · 43
Julia
(Not sure what Psychic Telephone is all about? Check out our first and second posts for an introduction to the project.)
The thing about psychic hotlines, Julia says, is anybody can call. So you get a much bigger pool of people. And sometimes it just isn’t quite right. Not a good fit. Maybe they want the psychic who’s going to talk to their angels. Maybe they want to talk about their alien abduction. Maybe they want to talk about their spirit guides. But those are not Julia’s things. She does energy stuff. She’s not the person who’s going to talk about your spirit guides. And she definitely doesn’t want to talk about your alien abduction shit. And the thing about it being a business—you needed them to stay on the line. So she’d try to make it work, but sometimes it would just be, not good.
She had one lady call, she was so aggressive and demanding, just angry and mean. She was like, Why can’t I fall in love! I can’t find the right man! And Julia finally was like, Look how you are! When you act like that? And they spent five minutes yelling at each other until the lady hung up. And it was like, that lady just paid thirty bucks to basically be told she’s a bitch. She didn’t need a psychic, she needed a therapist. She needed some real healing. And she wanted to spend thirty dollars just yelling? But the worst was when people would call and say, My life is in shambles financially. It was like, hang the fuck up! Like, this isn’t a good way to spend your last few dollars. One lady said, I have to declare bankruptcy because I call the psychic hotline so much. Like please, bitch, hang up! Julia didn’t want to be a part of that.
She’s even had people demand refunds. This old woman who used to call her, she was so sweet. And she wanted to talk about when she would die. Just really wanted to know. Julia was like, That’s not my thing. I don’t do that. But we can talk about other stuff! So they did. But then her family got involved and they were really angry, saying, You’ve been ripping off our grandma! You charlatan! So she refunded all the money. That’s fine. But Grandma was having a good time. She was lonely, and they were neglecting her. If it took a psychic to get them to pay attention, that’s fine. But it was a bummer.
And, God bless it, her boss was a businessman. So he would tell her to say little things at the end to get them to come back. Like, You’re not ready to hear it all today. So wait a week and call me again. And that felt creepy. Like, ew. And what she noticed was, it’d be easy for psychics to be like, You’ll see a change in two weeks. You’ll see a change in three months. Because clients would ask. So it would give them a sense of hope, or relief, in the moment. But it was also stringing them along. Everything was always two weeks away, three months away.
And it started feeling manipulative and weird, and kind of disingenuous. Making predictions has always made her a little uncomfortable. She’s not really a read-the-future–type person. Because she feels like everything’s fluid, and things could change. Easily. Nothing’s set in stone. She has made predictions in her time, where people would come back later and say she was totally right. One guy was like, You said I was gonna meet a red-haired woman. I married her! But there were probably plenty that didn’t happen. And those people don’t call.
For many years, she had a lot of pretty devoted clients. She really tried to go hard to build her business. She had a website and an internet radio show and was going on once a week, talking about metaphysical stuff and readings. And it was getting some momentum behind it—or it felt like it, who knows. But the hotline sucked, and she was getting really burnt out. Then she had a falling-out with her boss. She didn’t feel good about how much money people were paying, and she didn’t like—she can’t get anywhere with you in ten minutes. And after her second child was born, she had a huge existential crisis. It was probably postpartum depression. So it culminated in breaking up with her boss. And all these clients that she had worked with for—some, decades—pffffft, all gone.
I love these cameos Marin thanks