I was knee-deep in twice-weekly therapy—individual and couple’s sessions—working hard and reading all the books, trying to muscle my way back to a marriage that felt right. This was back in 2011, and I can still access the heavy, panicky feelings of stuckness. I was worn-out, unsteady, and mistrustful of my instincts. I didn’t know what to do next.
Enter woo-woo.
Three separate intuitive readings—one in a church, one with a therapist, one in a bar—all confirmed what my gut knew but my ashamed head and heart were still trying to deny: It was OK to call it and move on.
I wasn’t necessarily new to the spirit realm at this point in my life. I was in high school when The Craft came out. In early-’90s fashion, one of my closest friends had collected a journal of crystals and spells that we’d pore over while listening to Tori Amos. We wanted to cause something in the universe to shift to make something happen. Anything! At our high-performing public school, pre-9/11 and pre-Columbine, my closest friends and I had big feelings and wells of angst with no actual life drama to hang it all on. We were ready for our lives of romance and adventure. Maybe the crystals would jump-start something.
Turning to magic for fun became a vacation go-to through my teens and 20s. I was always down for a palm reading on a touristy swing through Savannah, a pop into a storefront psychic in New York City, a reading in a medium’s living room during a weekend trip to Salem, Massachusetts. When I stepped away from my day job, psychics were a place to cast away my impatience and insecurities and collect clues about what was to come. Someone with blond hair whose name starts with R. Hmmm. I’d come into some money in the fall. Great! I was going to find purpose in teaching, or was it health care? Some kind of service. That sounds close enough, maybe?
None of these predictions came to life exactly as described. But they did give me some peace.
I didn’t mind their imprecision, because it was all a bit of a joke. I also came of age alongside 1-900 numbers for psychics and Ouija boards at slumber parties where you could guess which of your friends was nudging it. Magic was fun but nothing truly to count on.
Same with faith generally. I grew up going to church, but it was a Unitarian one founded by a bunch of engineers and chemists who’d landed in West Virginia to work for chemical companies. Finding themselves in the Bible Belt, they needed a place to have coffee and talk about reason. “Humanist” was how some defined themselves. “Stubbornly atheist” would also be apt. It was a wonderful multigenerational community where I learned about doing your part and showing up consistently. Any reference to a higher power was scoffed at from the back. Prayer felt like playacting.
And then, in 2011, when I was 30 years old and didn’t know what to do, these psychics started showing up in my life.
First was the therapist, whom a friend recommended when things were just beginning to get rough in my marriage. She’s intuitive, my friend told me. Like, really intuitive. Was I into that? Heck yes, I was. On and off, for more than a year, I’d have sessions with my intuitive therapist. We would start out in regular therapy mode, and then she would start drawing a sort of swirl on her pad of paper and stop me short during my monologue of the latest updates in my life. Sometimes her comments were innocuous, sometimes encouraging. “That job interview, you know that went really well, right? The interviewer really liked you.”
And then, as my marriage continued to sour: “When you asked him that, did you notice how his facial expression changed?” Or, “You say that, but you don’t really feel that way, right?” Her way of seeing, of interrupting, pushed me to admit things out loud that I was keeping not just from my therapist, but from myself. Like the ways two people who’d once cared so much for one another became more and more oblique with each other to hide how much had changed.
Like many divorces, ours started that way. We felt out of sync, and then were frustrated with each other, but it didn’t seem like there was a looming end. There was too much bound up, so much history. Plus, I didn’t want to get divorced. Or rather, I didn’t want to think of myself as someone who would get divorced.
I started going back to church. I drove over to a Unitarian church in Flushing from Brooklyn every other week with my friend Danielle. She was newly sober and in the throes of online dating, and we’d talk on our drive about all the new tools she was learning in meetings, and we’d try to apply them to my general unhappiness. One Sunday, we stayed after the service, and a fellow churchgoer—a woman in her 60s—offered to do a tarot reading for both of us right there in the sanctuary. At one point, she flipped over the Divorce card. I gasped. She and I both nodded. There it was.
At least, that’s how my memory has recorded that moment. Is there even a divorce card? Maybe not. It was probably Death, with its haunting image of a cloaked figure in black, hunched over. But the effect of seeing that card was like a teaspoon tap-tap-tapping on the top of an eggshell.
Before that reading, I was trudging through, head down and resolute. Afterward, I could finally admit that these cracks would likely bring the whole thing down.
That opening kept getting wider. What were once good-faith conversations about what I needed and what he needed morphed into barbed back-and-forths and knowing cheap shots. The joint therapy sessions stopped delivering those moments of afterglow, and at home, it started to feel suffocating to be in the same space. This wasn’t great, seeing as we lived in a studio. I tried to find reasons to stay out after work. He went away on an unplanned road trip.
And I think this is how, not long after my church-sanctuary tarot reading, I ended up in a bar with a friend in the East Village and noticed a drag queen with tarot cards set up on a folding table.
Would I like a reading? Heck yes, I would!
This last reading confirmed the first two assessments. I was at an ending, but what I remember in that dark, loud bar was how this beautiful, wigged woman emphasized all that was coming next. The cards had wings and carriages, and there was a lot of talk about tapping into the universe’s current of grace and abundance. I was going to be OK, she told me.
Yes, this was a sad ending, all these readings confirmed. But it was time to stop trying to outrun it. That thing you’re most scared of? You can walk through it.
Three out of three psychic readings agreed: Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.
Once I accepted that my marriage had run its course and my ex and I faced that reality together, the conversations between us got kinder. (He even eventually let me interview him for my book.) I started asking around for pointers from co-workers I’d heard had gotten divorced. I collected referrals for lawyers and finally landed on an affordable and merciful nonprofit called the New Start Project. We got our paperwork filed. He moved out. We moved on.
Still, my future-sensing angels didn’t insulate me from more mess. I stayed on my sister’s floor for a visit to San Francisco and flirted too aggressively with the art-supply store clerk and wept in her Pilates class during hip openers. I crumpled on a stoop with my co-worker Steven, who gave me a cigarette after we got out of the taxi after a too-many-rounds happy hour, and I exhaled into a puddle of tears that started one of the deepest friendships I’ve forged since. And I explored new romances in fits and starts—including with my now-husband Arthur, who revived our romance after I let it stall out because I was afraid I couldn’t see our path ahead with enough clarity. I was afraid to trust. I learned to trust a little more. And I got brave enough to look at my life with clear eyes.
That’s why I’ve come to have such respect for intuitive readings. Not for the hair color of my next savior or the timeline for a coming windfall. I want someone to shake me out of my denial and rigidity. I want someone who has the cards in front of them to tell me honestly what they see leaking out. What I’m evading and what I’m holding too tightly.
Like I did back then, I still need help recognizing where I need help.
Today, 13 years after that spring of psychics, I’m knee-deep in my second draft of adulthood— this one built out with a second marriage, two kids, and two dogs. It is full and untidy and not easy, but a world away from that tightly wound sadness I knew before.
Still, when I started 2024, I was back getting another reading, this time with Rebecca Auman, a self-identified witch. I’d been knocked back in my professional life—the podcast I’d made was facing cancellation, and I was freaked out about money and my creative future, like a lot of podcast makers whose livelihoods shifted with a fickle ad market. I was scared and frantic again, unsure about what to change and how much to try to build on familiar foundations.
“You’re efforting,” Rebecca told me. “We’re going to consider flow and surrender.”
Flow and surrender—holding things loosely and letting them unfold in their time—are not the hallmarks of my style of working parenthood. Producing and executing are more my modes. This works when you’re planning the grocery needs for the week. Figuring out how to mourn market forces is not so to-do-listable. Neither is balancing disappointment with trying again.
The cards’ messages were different this year; less stark, but similarly soothing. If you let up on the worry, you’ll find that you know. You’ve got what you need right inside you: little Anna with her propulsive appetite for adventure, grown-up Anna who’s gotten good at managing a lot, and alongside them, that little mystery guide nudging her toward what she can’t yet see.
Unfurl a little, Anna, she urged me. Let it all happen.
Anna Sale is the host of Death, Sex & Money, an interview show that moved to Slate earlier this year. Hear part of her year-ahead tarot reading and an interview with Rebecca Auman in Death, Sex & Money’s latest episode.
