Intuitive(ly)

The thing that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up was when she asked about a specific plumbing problem I’ve been having, and chided me for planning to take care of it myself when it’s not my responsibility. My toilet has been leaking for weeks, and my landlords are not addressing it for some reason. I want them to like me, and to never kick me out or raise my rent, and so I hate to nag them about things. This issue was the very last thing I was fretting about before I rushed out the door to meet the intuitive, and one of the very first things she mentioned.

That’s when I asked her if she minded if I wrote everything down.

I’m not exactly a skeptic when it comes to extrasensory perception, but I’m not a true believer either. On the one hand, I think I have a heightened ability to know what people are thinking that is beyond what can be logically explained. On the other hand, my old therapist called that “magical thinking” and described my belief in that idea as an adaptation that many kids from chaotic homes develop in order to help them control their environments–or at least give them the illusion that they can control their environments. He seemed to think my gift was more of a “thing we should work on in therapy” than a “thing to be revered and envied.” I know what he was thinking though…he only wishes he could just intuit what his patients were thinking instead of waiting for them to spit it out.

That plumbing thing, though…even with my powers, I could not have intuited that.

As long as we are out here in the touchy-feely new age freakzone already, I think I was kind of meant to read the blogs (City Girl and Livitluvit) that led me to reach out to this particular person at this particular juncture in my life. Under any circumstances, I think she would just be my kind of person. The kind of person I am supposed to know. I meet people like this from time to time, with whom I just click right away, and it always feels like a stroke of extraordinary luck. The fact that she seemed to know things about me that there is simply no earthly way she could have known was a huge bonus, though.

“Do you believe that there are certain people in your life who you have been connected to across many lifetimes, who appear again and again for some reason?” a very dogmatic, Catholic, Yankee, totally un-New Age person I know asked me last week. The question had absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. I nodded; I do believe this, have always believed it, but I don’t look at it too closely because it sounds kind of insane. I think of it as the secret, Enya-and-crystals-esque corollary to the idea that people attract the same kind of bad drama into their lives over and over again until they have consciously dealt with the sharp object that made the original groove into which that drama fits. In other words, if you didn’t get along that well with your father, you are definitely marrying someone juuuust like him unless you get yourself to therapy post-haste.

**************************

“I wonder what she’ll say,” I mused aloud to a friend last week. Everyone has been very intrigued by this intuitive business.

“She’s going to say that things are about to get much better for you, that you only have to take care of what you need to take care of and then good things are going to start happening. She’s going to say that these next few years are your time, and that it’s all going to work out,” she replied. “Or maybe that’s just what I think.”

I told the intuitive this. “Maybe you should give her the sixty bucks,” she said shrewdly.

******************************

The way it works, as I understand it, is that the intuitive looks at your picture to see if she can get a read on you at all, and if she can, she agrees to see you.  Before the session, she really concentrates on the photo and comes prepared with lots of impressions. But, as the session goes on, she gets more and more–this makes sense (if you believe any of this makes sense) because the vibes are stronger when someone is right in front of you.  So sometimes, as we were chatting, she would kind of interrupt herself to say something new, and the conversation would move in a new direction.

“You are so afraid that you’re going to end up old and alone and surrounded by cats,” she said impatiently at one point. I say that too much, I know, but I promise I hadn’t said it to her. “You need to put that idea of yourself out of your mind. It’s not your path, unless you choose it. You set your own boundaries for what’s possible, so start setting the ones you want.”

We were wearing the same identical boots. Doesn’t that seem weird?

******************************

She did give me some really specific things to watch for, dates and times and Senegalese men and salary ranges. (“So get a bikini wax in April for sure,” she said at one point. “I see that stuff too sometimes,” she confided, referring to people’s sex lives with a wave of her hand. “But I try not to dwell on it.”) Some strongly worded advice about a family situation that was so dead-on it stole my breath. (“Don’t worry about what your sister thinks you should do; it’s not her decision, and she needs to come to her own conclusion, in her own time, in her own way.” This situation is one my sister and I have been debating rather contentiously for the past couple of weeks, without reaching agreement.) She said she can see the man I will end up with, but she won’t tell me much about him because I will need to make a choice, and I need to make it wholly on my own. (He dislikes cats, though.)

We didn’t talk much about Lieu, until near the end when I said, “So, I kind of thought you might tell me that he’s going to come back repentant, and that we’ll end up together after all.” Ha ha! I smiled weakly, because I am well aware of just how wack that statement is. She did not smile back. “Even if you could marry him, you don’t want to. You were lonely in that relationship, maybe more lonely than you would have been if you were actually alone. That would never, ever change.  Write THAT down.”

******************************

“You know what you need to do. You don’t need me to tell you that you have to take care of some things that are blocking your path to happiness. You just need a kick in the ass and someone to tell you that the happiness you want is out there. So I’m telling you. The only person who can keep it from happening is you.”

I am starting to think that one of these days, being told that exact same thing by myriad people who are in my life in a variety of paid and unpaid capacities will really start to have an effect.