Psychic Telephone · 9
Julia
In the past couple of years, Julia’s been taking some meditation classes with people who came out of the Berkeley Psychic Institute way of doing things, but kind of spun it in new directions. And that’s been helpful for her. Mostly for her own mental health, to feel like she has a community and to not be alone. Because she feels like she needs to be in a community of people who know what she’s talking about. It makes it feel more real, and more fun, and like she’s not just crazy. And that’s been great. She just wishes we lived in a world where this was more mainstream, or more accessible.
She thinks psychics get unhealthy pretty easily because they’re living in a reality where most of—the group agreement of the mainstream is like, That’s not real. And they’re sensitive, and they’re kind of noticing things other people don’t notice, or feeling things that other people don’t feel. And there’s really no one to talk to about it. And if you try to talk to people, they think it’s weird. So you can get lonely. She knows a lot of psychics with addiction issues, or like self-medicating. And relationship turbulence. A lot of psychics she knows don’t have partners. People who have psychic abilities get overwhelmed pretty easily and maybe need to be alone a lot, to decompress.
And actually she was a better psychic when she was living as a single person with not a lot of stimulation, living a very hermetic-type life. Because then she could have that detachment and really connect with it. Once she had a family, she felt like she can’t afford to be listening to that, watching that, all day, because she has to function. Now she has to interact, to go to the school thing, whatever. But luckily her husband is very open, so they talk—they’ll have fun. They’ll be in a restaurant and they’ll be doing kind of mini readings of the people at other tables. And that’s so important, to have people to talk to about it.
Because she thinks that’s when the psychic gets really sick—when they don’t have that. And that might be one reason she finally left. When she was younger, she kept thinking these ideas were going to become more mainstream. That people were going to start to embrace this shit. And she waited and waited, and it didn’t seem like it was happening. It felt like there was always resistance. So she always felt self-conscious when she met new people. Even when she was really going full steam, she had a hard time describing her work. A lot of the terms, people aren’t comfortable with. A lot of discomfort. Sometimes being mocked. There was always that Prove it! Like, What am I thinking? It’s like, come on.
She feels like psychic people are not well adjusted to this reality because this reality doesn’t support humans being real humans. We’re in a world where we’re not in touch with our own bodies, our own abilities. She thinks that, historically, we got into a situation where it was like, Don’t use it. Especially as we became more industrialized. Because we’re not spending as much time in nature—we’re not walking, we’re not noticing, we’re not using those abilities. And she thinks it makes people sick, if they’re not able to figure out how to use it, or work with it, or understand it. And this sounds paranoid, but she thinks there are literally industries built on—capitalizing on—us being disconnected from our own selves. And that’s sad.
For herself, she’s married and has two kids, but she doesn’t know if she’s that healthy. She’s always had some disordered eating. She eats too much sugar, that’s for sure. When she was younger, working in a metaphysical bookstore, she would skip breakfast and drink a lot of coffee with sugar in it and smoke cigarettes all day. She thought she was a badass. Whatever. She thinks that why psychics get addicted is they’re like, I need a break. They’re trying to get away, or dull it down. But she doesn’t worry about not being able to turn it off. She thinks she’s made a trade. She’d rather have her awareness, and maybe live imperfectly, than try to be rigid and be super healthy.
I had a similar thought!
I see psychics have all the same issues as poets :)