What I Actually Do
I read encyclopedias as a child — not for school, not for a gold star, not for anyone deciding whether I was doing childhood correctly. Most little girls wanted a bike, or a boy to notice the bike. I wanted to know what the Phoenicians were trading before anyone had bothered inventing a word for currency, because even then I understood something most adults still haven't caught up to: money is only a story enough people agree to believe at the same time, and I was always more curious about who wrote the story than about whether I'd been included in it. No one was watching. That's usually where you find out what you actually are, instead of what you've been quietly performing since breakfast for an audience that was never even in the room.
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The cards are furniture. Gorgeous furniture — the kind you'd want photographed — but furniture all the same. I let my hands rest somewhere so the rest of me is free to do the real work, which is softer and stranger than a deck of cards: your face when you think no one's reading it, the pause before you answer a question you weren't ready for, the sentence you started and then let dissolve because some part of you wasn't sure the room could hold it yet. I was never reading tarot. I was reading you. The cards simply give us both somewhere lovely to rest our eyes while I do.
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I trained under a shaman for years — not a retreat, not a weekend, not something you do between brunch and a facial. The kind of training where the question stops being is this safe and becomes am I ready, because those are entirely different questions, and only one of them lets you keep going. It asked things of me I still don't discuss lightly. And when it was time, I went quiet — not performatively, the way certain creatures go still before a change in weather only they can sense yet. No one documents that part. There's no soft-lit photo for the years spent becoming someone before you're allowed to say so out loud. But I came back whole. Which is rarer than anyone likes to admit.
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Why There's No Second Appointment
Here is the promise underneath everything I do: I am not trying to see you again next month. I know what it costs — years of it, not just money — to leave a room having been soothed rather than actually met, the same ache wrapped a little more prettily each time, guaranteed to loosen again right on schedule. That isn't always intended. Sometimes an entire industry simply grows comfortable keeping women almost well, forever, because almost well keeps returning. I have no interest in almost. Some sessions take an hour. Some unfold over days, because certain things in a woman's life were never going to resolve themselves quickly and deserve the time they ask for — not because I've turned her into something recurring. Either way, she leaves able to hear her own voice again without mine standing in front of it. That's the whole of it. I know I've done it right when she no longer needs me to.
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