I Saw Three Psychics In a Week and—Spoiler Alert—They All Said The Same Thing

“In terms of love…” my psychic begins the reading. Her false eyelashes flutter as she scans my palm. She squints as though attempting to read some inscrutable handwriting, “Yeah, I don’t see anything.” I look down at my hand feeling betrayed. I stretch it open further, hoping some trace of a sexy future will appear in the finer lines. She looks up at me apologetically, “Sorry. Your heart chakra is closed.” Shit.

I’m sitting in a cramped room in a white leather chair with enamel jewels set in the tufting. At least five Buddha statues sit around me and about 80 crystals crowd every surface. My hand rests on a small white table next to a crystal ball that, to my dismay, we do not use. The carpet smells like cigarettes and burnt sage. I found this particular psychic the way I find most things: a search on Google Maps for anything in a 1-mile radius. On the Eastside of Los Angeles, this search yielded nearly a dozen. This particular psychic—we’ll call her Amber—works out of the typical LA strip mall setup. There is a sandwich board outside with a menu of psychic offerings: $35 for a palm reading, $10 for a 3-card tarot pull, the list goes on.

“Psychics just tell you what you want to hear,” my friends warned me when I brought up my mission to see three psychics in a week. “You’re an easy target. You’re young, you’re blonde, and you live in LA—they’ll just assume you’re an 'aspiring something’ and tell you you’re special.” They’re not totally wrong, but I’d argue the issue is more specific to Los Angeles than my personal gullibility. At its core, LA is an aspirational city. Over the last 200 years, the American Dream™ moved steadily west until it hit the coast, resulting in generations of dizzy, unsatisfied escapists, always lurching toward some elusive sense of fulfillment. A unique alchemy of bravery and delusion characterizes most Angelenos. For those of us who have chosen this precarious and foolhardy lifestyle, it’s no wonder strip-mall psychics are a dime a dozen in this town. With an uncertain future, who wouldn’t want a little $10 reassurance?

Turns out, Amber certainly had no plans to tell me what I wanted to hear. After rudely informing me my heart chakra was MIA, she tempered it with some optimism. “Your career line is direct. You’ve faced some obstacles in your recent past that made you doubt yourself, but if you can commit, you will get what you want.” I’m liking the sound of this a bit more. She asks, “Do you get overly concerned with the drama of other people and let it affect your life too heavily?” I concur with a bashful nod. “Yeah, that makes you less appealing to be around.” Ouch. “Your health is on a good track, but you could use more supplements.” I feel like this is a direct dig at how shitty my nails look. She finishes the reading with some sound advice, “Focus on yourself. Focus on sharing your creative gifts with the world. You give too much power to the setbacks and it’s made you turn your back on the gifts the universe has given you.” Vague, but sweet.

Now, because this project was in the service of journalism, I brought along a friend who was willing to act as a control group. I wanted to have a little ammunition against the “they say the same thing to everyone” skeptics. My friend Dani had a palm reading that quickly put that claim to rest. Looking at Dani’s palm Amber said, “You’re going to meet a man who will be your soulmate in the next 1-2 years. You will likely meet him at work because your love line touches your career line. He will have a bad reputation but focus on how he treats you and not his past. You will have two kids.” So I’m a chump with no romantic future and this bitch gets a soulmate? Thanks, Amber.

At the end of the session, I ask Amber, “What will happen to me if my heart chakra stays closed?” She said it could “eventually block my other chakras and lead to serious health issues—high blood pressure, embolism, even a heart attack.” Jesus Christ. She continues, “I can offer you a cleansing to open it up if you’re interested?” I feel like she’s trying to upsell me, so I tell her I’ll think about it.

Once we’re out of earshot, Dani starts laughing at me. “She really nailed you with that one!” We debrief in the car. “The craziest thing for me,” Dani shares, “is that is exactly what the last psychic said to me.” I ask her which psychic she’s talking about. “Remember when I told you I met Tom DeLonge’s lawyer at that Christmas party? She gave me the number of her psychic”—I love LA. Dani recounts meeting this psychic over Zoom and the reading was uncannily similar to Amber’s: she will meet her soulmate in the next 1-2 years through a work-related situation and they will live in a house with two kids. This makes it sound like they just played a game of M.A.S.H., but it piques my interest. Dani adds, “She also said that me and my ex were married in a past life and he was an alcoholic in the last one, too.” “Give me her number,” I demand.

The Zoom psychic—Mindy, as we’ll call her—meets me over video promptly at 9:45 AM the next morning. I stage my computer with a blank background so as not to give her any context clues. We exchange niceties at the top of the call, but I’m careful not to reveal anything personal. I was expecting the whole thing to be a bit awkward, but she is congenial and her honey-sweet voice lulls me into the present. “I’m going to start with a prayer, and when I say the prayer I’m creating a sort of virtual room for our energies to meet together. I’m going to give you instructions on how to say your name, and when you say your name that is going to be you walking into the room.” She continues, “Let everything that’s happened this morning or plans for later fall away like a leaf falling from a tree.” I attempt to quiet my busy mind. She drops into a prayer before asking me to recite my full name three times. It feels like summoning Bloody Mary, but the mirror is my Zoom box at the corner of my screen. “How energy shows up for me,” Mindy explains, “is in colors and pictures. If you hear me reference analogies and metaphors, that’s just because it’s how I see it.”

She begins the session by reading my energy on a macro scale. As soon as she “meets me” in the metaphorical room, she laughs and says, “I see you in here and…okay, there’s a lot.” She breaks down the type of energy I have—my excitement, my ambition, my doubt—but since you, as the reader, don’t know me personally, I will skip over the navel-gazing. Mindy then tells me, “Who you are as a soul over and over again has the constitution of an artist. Some people are sustainers, some are maintainers, some are healers—we’re not all chocolate or vanilla, we’re an amalgam of all things—but we do have a dominant setting, and you are an artist.” An artist? Oh la la. I’m not above flattery, so this goes straight to my head. “You have a decent amount of foreign energy in your aura. Foreign energy creates doubt. It creates fuzziness and squishiness about things that don’t need to be there.” The reading, while far more elaborate, follows Amber’s quite closely.

“I want to take a look at your heart space,” Mindy says transitioning from the topic of my career. “Your heart is like a home. How do you decorate it? Are there hamburger wrappers on the floor? I want to see how you have it set up.” Apparently my decorating is not quite up to par, because upon seeing my “heart space” she asks, “Is it cool if I give you a wee bit of healing while we’re doing this? Just to move some energy around. It’s like a loose tooth, if it’s already almost ready to go, let’s get it out of there.” We sit in silence for a moment before she says, “Ahh, there we go. It’s like a big ol’ burp you let out so now you can breathe easier.” Whether it’s placebo or not, I do feel a bit lighter.

When we arrive at the topic of relationships, the reading gets spicy. To get information on a specific relationship in your life, Mindy will ask you to say your crush’s name three times to summon them into the psychic space. I start off asking about a girl I’ve been casually seeing, hoping to get some clarity on my own feelings in the situation. Once Mindy summons her into the space, she starts to read our dynamic in the spirit realm. Are we facing one another? If so, are we really looking at each other? Is one of us looking away? Is someone’s energy more intense and needy than the other? Without divulging too many personal details, I can tell you that the answers are uncanny. I ask to summon another woman—a summer fling that left me more rattled than I like to admit. “She looks at you and then she looks away. She faces you again, and looks away…There’s a weird game being played here. She’s erratic. I would be guarded around this one. The issues are bigger than you, but be careful.” If I heard this six months ago, it would have saved a lot of time overanalyzing text messages and Insta story views.

When I’m done interrogating her about my exes, I move on to my last question: Do I have any past lives? Turns out, I sure do. According to Mindy, in my past life I was a Midwestern man that worked in an ice cream shop. I loved drawing—my soul is an artist, remember?—and I married the girl I was “sweet on” before serving in the Korean War. I lived through the war and ended up selling insurance after I moved back to my hometown. “You were just like a Norman Rockwell Painting,” Mindy adds. She explains that the past lives that show up are the ones we need to learn from the most. “Your spirit is accessing your soda-shop-Korea life, because you already played it safe. It wasn’t a bad life at all, you were very happy, but you’ve been there, done that. There’s less expansion. You don’t need to repeat that. Remember, you’re building something here.” I had two separate friends that were told they’d been a European prince in their past lives, but I’ll take a Midwestern ice cream clerk. At least I can now check off my “veteran status” on government intake forms.

By the third day, I’m admittedly a little psychic-ed out (as I’m sure you are reading this), but one must abide by the rule of threes. Still nervous about my potentially life-threatening heart chakra problem, I took a stroll to my local crystal shop to buy some candles—better safe than sorry. Martin, the shop owner, is a fabulous gentleman with waist-length black hair, and patent leather high-heeled boots. He wears enough beaded necklaces, bracelets and rings to make him rattle like a rainstick with every movement. As a friend of a friend, he offers me a complimentary tarot reading. We sit down at a mirrored table and he begins shuffling. The deck is well-loved and worn with use.

The spread of cards shows an alarming amount of swords criss-crossing and clashing. Martin explains, “You are working harder than you need to and against your own self-interest.” He pulls a moon and a priestess and giggles to himself, “Oh, I like you.” Mysterious. He divulges the meaning of the spread, “To help you in this situation you need to be open to all the gifts people are giving you. Stop focusing on your ego and accept what is coming your way. Start trusting yourself or doubt will get the best of you.” A sentiment I’ve now heard three days in a row. He continues, “Right now your heart is closed off”—here we go again—“and you need to work on pushing past your trauma.” My therapist would concur. “When you refuse the gifts of the universe, your spirit guides take it as a sign to stop giving. They shut off and step back. We live in a multiverse; everything you are and can be is happening simultaneously. When you align yourself with the vision of your most ideal future, you create the universe you want to live in.” He looks between my face and the spread of cards between us. “Don’t be so scared.” I laugh. “No really, honey,” he assures me. “Fuck everyone. Fuck their opinions. It’s easier said than done, but you’ll never be happy if you can’t let go.”

I admit, when I pitched the idea to see three psychics in one week it was partially a gimmick. What I thought would be an examination of “woo woo” aspirational LA culture ended up being a grueling examination of my own neuroses and the myriad of ways I’m apparently ruining my own life. Whether or not you believe in psychics, there is a certain Rorschach blot element to these readings—you see what you want to see, you pay attention to what resonates, and in the end, your own reaction gives you more information than any fact or fiction they throw at you. Wading through my own psychological muck, I realized that a psychic’s job is to be a mirror. When you’re face-to-face with yourself, all the questions and answers get mixed up in the ouroboros of our own self-perception. “No one can tell you your future,” Martin explains to me. “I don’t believe in destiny or fate. The future is all in your control.” Will Dani be happily married to her soulmate in two years? Ultimately, that’s up to her. Will I die young due to my constipated heart chakra? Will the candle Martin gave me save me from that dismal fate? That, again, is up to me. In the meantime, I’m heading to Ralph’s to buy some heart-healthy Cheerios to have as part of my balanced breakfast. Baby steps.