All My Past Futures

How tarot found me.

On a late summer afternoon three years ago, in a cramped, curtained-off space at the back of a paranormal bookshop in an exceptionally haunted town by the New Jersey seaside, a septuagenarian named Frank turned me into a tarot reader.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was a hot mess in my twenties. I know you’re thinking, “Yes, Katie…we all were.” It’s the decade of big swings and bigger misses; when you’re somehow both hyper confident and utterly clueless about every decision. You saunter through life like a beautiful idiot, destined to look back on your shenanigans with a twinkle in your cringing eye.

I leaned into the quintissential invincibility of those years, but my decade was also dosed with a heady cocktail of inevitability. I’d been deeply anorexic through college, and watching my dad die when I was 23 snapped the last precarious thread tethering me to sanity—everything suddenly felt both fleeting and vital. I didn’t have the emotional capacity or support to deal with my trauma, so I smothered it. By the end of the decade, I battled an eating disorder, substance abuse, sex addiction, and mental illness. And boy oh boy was I against the ropes.

Between punches, I became obsessed with seeing tarot readers and psychics. I needed answers that I couldn’t find inside the gaping maw of my stomach, or at the bottom of a bottle, or through the chaotic lustful grip of a stranger. I distinctly remember wanting to scoop my brain out, most days—how attempting to reason with my existence felt like something too burdensome to bear.

I hit up all the usual suspects—readers in pop-up tents at street fairs, people with hand-written PSYCHIC signs displayed in dingy shop windows situated on well-trod avenue blocks, folks recommended through friends of friends of friends. I’d plop whatever fee they requested onto the table between us, take furious notes during the readings, pile the scribbled-on sheets of wrinkled paper in the nightstand drawer next to my bed, and hungrily flip through the ever-thickening stack each week, willing the accumulated far-fetched predictions to come true. I knew full well that I was being swindled, but I also needed something to believe—and some rando’s fanfiction about my life was as good as anything. Surely, I was about to come into a windfall inheritance, I was destined to be a world-famous journalist, and my great true love was just around the corner. I flailed wildly during my mad descent and managed to hit every crook on the way down.

I still remember the worst one—a woman with a tiny storefront on 14th Street whose eyes brightened when I walked through the door and burst into tears. She immediately lit some cloying incense, placed several small shiny tumbled stones in front of me, and folded her hands, patiently listening to my pleas for guidance. After giving me a vague reading during which I bawled and blew my nose into a soggy tissue, she told me she could strengthen the energy of my future (whatever the fuck that means) by praying for me at a chapel. For a nominal extra fee, of course. I nodded, bleary-eyed, and she physically walked me to a nearby ATM, where she instructed me to take $500 out of my account. I was deeply in debt at the time, but I had several nearly maxed-out credit cards, and I managed to make one work. She folded the crisp bills into her pocket, patted me on the shoulder, and left me hiccup-crying on the curb next to a pile of stinking summer heat-marinated garbage bags. I may as well have shoved the money through one of the rat-chewed holes in the black plastic.

Oddly, none of those experiences turned me off from spirituality. I grew up knowing I’d inherited matrilineal psychic abilities, and that I’m surrounded by ghosts. I see now that my desperate attempts to seek external answers from miscreant mystics were just another smothering. An inner knowing was calling to me, but it was buried under a massive pile of unexploded trauma-forged ordnance. I simply didn’t have the armor or the training, yet, to enter and clear the minefield.

And then came Frank.

I was freshly relocated from Brooklyn to my cottage in the New Jersey countryside, still in wide-eyed fish-out-of-water mode, and staying at a friend’s Asbury Park beach house for a week. During an early exploratory walk of the area, I wandered into an occult-themed bookstore smack in the middle of the town’s main drag. I browsed the titles and chatted with the owner about a ghost tour they were hosting that evening. All the while, I was aware of an older gentleman standing in the front corner of the shop, wryly observing. Neatly dressed in an ironed button-down and slacks, with slicked-back grey hair and a tidy mustache, he reminded me of my Italian grandfather’s BINGO buddies—he had the stance of one who gesticulates with his hands, laughs with his entire midsection, and chucks you under the chin while telling you a hard truth. Every so often, the owner would nod at him as if he was part of our conversation. I figured he was a regular just hanging around, glomming onto the surrounding action.

At some point, the subject of psychic readings came up, and the shop owner said, “Frank still has some openings today.”

“Who’s Frank?” I asked.

“You know, Frank,” she said, nodding towards the man in the corner. He eyed me evenly, then pointed to a sign by the front desk.

Tarot readings: $20 for 10 minutes, $40 for 20 minutes, $50 for 30 minutes. The old instinct flared, fire-hot beneath my skin. Fingers tingling, I placed a ten and two twenties on the counter and Frank straightened from his casual lean against the wall to lead me towards a black curtain-lined space in the back. I sat on a folding chair, he enclosed us in darkness with the flick of a wrist, lit a candle on a red cloth-draped table between us, spread out a deck of tarot cards, and had me choose one at a time until I’d created a customized spread.

“How long have you been a psychic and medium?” I asked as he turned the cards over one by one.

“Since I was a kid,” he responded in an even, drawling Jersey accent. “My grandfather visited me in spirit holding his chest right after he died of a heart attack.”

Nothing about Frank fit my narrative of what a psychic was like—his presence was so salt-of-the-earth, so comforting. He should be playing chess in the park or walking his grandchild around the corner to grab a cannoli, not craning his neck to gaze at a grouping of divination tools.

I instantly trusted him. And so did my dad, who came through first—loud and clear.

“Was your father a big man?” Frank asked, gazing off to my right side.

“No, quite the opposite,” I replied, laughing.

“His arms look huge. He’s flexing his muscles at me,” he said.

“He’s trying to impress you. It’s a joke. He was really insecure about his height and stature, and I always know he’s coming through when someone tells me they see a very large man. He overcompensates in the afterlife.”

Frank cracked his first and only smile, then placed a hand on his abdomen.

“Pancreatic cancer?”

I nodded.

“He knows it changed you, what you saw at the end. He’s sorry.”

My eyes stung; I swallowed hard.

Then Frank turned to the spread.

He told me I was writing a book (little did he know, I’d begun outlining a new idea the weekend prior). He saw me signing papers, working with large teams of people to edit and promote it, making lots of money. There’d be time spent overseas, a large advance for more. I’d be consumed and energized by the work.

“When?” I asked, elated.

Frank shrugged. “In time.”

He added that I have psychic abilities like his, that I’d embrace them and use them to help myself and then, eventually, others.

“How?” I wondered aloud.

Frank shrugged. “You’ll see.”

I narrowed my eyes, and he dipped his chin in a sage nod.

“It’s all already inside you.”

I emerged back into the brightness of the bookshop, blinking against the light spilling through the front windows, feeling dazed and fizzy-full of hope.

It quickly soured. Would everything happen because of what I was told—because that knowing sparked energy in me that would create it—or was it always going to happen, whether I knew it or not? I clutched Frank’s first prediction white knuckle-tight—so close that I worried I was wielding his words too prescriptively; that I was creating my book with undue expectations, placing the unbearable pressure of a presumed future upon my shoulders. Would all this change the way I wrote it? Would it alter the way I put it out into the world? Could I fuck up my future by trying too hard to live up to it?

I think the most succinct answer to all of it is: yes. Though I spared very little energy on his second declaration, two years later I fell into formally studying spiritual mediumship; I’m now passionate about modeling death awareness and positivity for others. I’ve also finished that book and spent the last eight months querying it to agents. There seem to be no contract signings in sight, and the experience has been maddening, to say the least. To assuage my relentless anxiety, I’ve again found myself seeking answers.

And so, a few months ago, I took up tarot.

I practice every night, asking the cards about whatever happens to be on my mind. The responses are always eerily specific and comforting. I’d struggled with my connection to spirit during traditional mediumship work, but having the shared language of the major and minor arcanas between us makes communication feel almost effortless. I’m finding with each passing day that my attitude has become more Frank-like—I speak in shrugs, flush with the knowledge of a future that contains a truth reachable by an ever-changing path.

Nothing has turned out like I expected it to in wake of that thirty-minute reading three years ago, and yet it’s all begun to come about in its own meandering way. Perhaps futures are both malleable and inexorable. While I was busy sweating the details, Frank’s words enveloped me like a shield—they armed me with assuredness, allowing me to dive safely into the self-work I’d long put off. I circumvented and disarmed those deep-seated land mines, and I met my true self on the other side.

I’ve finally found the person I so desperately needed two decades ago; she’s been patiently waiting inside me all along. Every evening, she spreads a new future before me. It’s always true.