Hello moon,
A year ago, a psychic told me within minutes of meeting me on the phone, “I don’t see anything better than the relationship you just had,” referring to my recent breakup with a former heroine addict who slept all the time, hid the specifics of a mountain of debt from me, had a laundry list of mysterious ailments, likened my vulva to Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama and threatened to kill himself more than once during our breakup, among other things. She declared that women were in the way of this relationship on both sides and when I tried to make sense of this claim, she told me I was confused and that I had blockages in my heart and third eye chakras and aura that needed to be cleared. We proceeded to work together for the next two weeks, talking on the phone everyday for about 5 minutes around 1pm.
During the calls, I’d mostly give her an update on my dating efforts and she’d mostly scold me for developing anxious attachments to men I barely knew. It was the sort of zany and familiar tough love trope that reads as bizarre in one light and endearing in another, especially when recounting the experience to friends at dinner parties.
Ultimately, as strange as the whole experience was (especially when she told me I’d been a womanizer in a past life who had died before I’d paid my karmic debts, hence my dating troubles in this life) she was the voice of reason that I needed in that season of life. She illuminated my neuroses around forming connections, steered me into a more easy and open-minded attitude about dating, and opened a portal of clarity around what I’m looking for in a connection, that I’m still learning from today.
But it’s been a year now and despite an abundance of connections and a whole lot of dating experience, I’m still single. Why haven’t any of the connections worked out this past year? In some instances, I was open to people who weren’t looking for relationships or who were in incompatible seasons of life. In others, I simply wasn’t interested enough or felt connected in friendship ways more than romantic. Still others, I remain confused (like the psychic said). I’ve gotten my heart properly broken a few times.
I’m in my mid-30’s now and even though I’m an empowered 21st century feminist, I do get the queasy feeling sometimes that life is passing me by, at least in some of the ways that it has shown up for others around me. I don’t see the path forward in romance or career and I’m aging out of possible timelines for motherhood. I have felt stuck for a long time now. I can’t quite get the psychic’s initial insinuation out of my head: you’ve had the best you’re going to have. On the one hand, I feel like that was a wildly irresponsible thing to say (is she even allowed to say that?) but on the other hand, I can see a grain of truth. I’ve had two long term relationships with men who were problematic but also deeply connected companions to me, in ways that I know to be special and even magical, and I still grieve that loss.
And on top of all that, I saw another psychic last month (my sister: you *have* to see this psychic, she changed my life) who said I have all sorts of chakra misalignments and I’ve delayed making important decisions which has kept me stuck and behind from where I’m meant to be.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that I should stop seeing psychics, but I can’t shake the truth that I do feel stuck, behind, and energetically blocked.
How does one get unstuck?
How does a girl find and receive love, without mucking it up with her chakra misalignments?
And while we’re asking the oracle: how does one heal from core abandonment wounds? In 200 words or less.
Jk. Help </3
Dear Chakra Misalignments,
You’ve written me at a very psychic time in my life—i.e., your missive is kind of a cute synchronicity, given that I’ve just started offering psychic-adjacent services of my own. Don’t worry, I didn’t pick this letter to cajole you into working with me…
Though I did audibly gasp and think, like you, “Are you allowed to say that?!” while reading about your past psychic readings.
Before we get to your dating life, let’s come to a tentative agreement about what might actually be happening during a so-called “psychic reading.” From my preferred medium (tarot), to obsidian mirror scrying and turtle plastron cracking, there are almost as many oracular methods as there are BPD hoes oracles.
Personally, I subscribe to the idea that, as Marie-Louise Von Franz put it, “we can no longer think of causality as absolute law, but only as a tendency or prevailing probability.” In other words, an oracle is showing you what’s probable given your current trajectory. This ties into chaos magick, which I’ve also written about (“chaos” referring not to disorder but a stratum of pure potential—all possible futures existing simultaneously until one collapses into reality).
Since you seem to relish tough love, I’ll be honest: your inclination towards visiting psychics is not so different from the type of guy who, four Monster drinks deep, refreshes Kalshi or DraftKings at 4am. He knows those numbers aren’t fixed prophecies, and you do too. You know the odds constantly shift as conditions change—which is what makes life (and unfortunately, online betting) so thrilling.
And sure, one way to nudge the odds in your favor is to use sigils. But another way to affect them is to use your own, everyday human agency. (In fact, I want to amend the Arthur C. Clarke saying: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I want to say: “Any sufficiently advanced extension of agency is indistinguishable from magic.”)
Now, let’s go back to that messed up prediction you got—that there’s nothing better for you than the terrible relationship you just got out of. Under our framework, and under the most generous set of assumptions (1. the psychic you talked to was legit, 2. she did in fact tap into something legit about you), all that means is: if you don’t exert agency to change your patterns of thought and behavior, the odds are that you will not find anything better.
Still not sunshine and roses, but… better. Right?
“No!” I hear you protest. “If I knew how to change my patterns of thought and behavior, I wouldn’t be writing you!”
Okayokay. Let’s talk about how to address your core abandonment wounds, in 200 words or fewer (I’ve trained for years under Twitter’s 280-character limit for precisely this moment).
Abandonment wounds operate by this brutal logic: you seek a lover who offers you a relationship that resembles the one you had with an early abandoner, usually a caregiver. The lover’s looks, personality, tastes, and interests can differ from the abandoner, but their dynamic with you—their emotional unavailability or how you have to work for their affection, perhaps—must be familiar.
My guess is that you’ve developed a sixth sense for relationships that match this template because part of you believes, “If I can make this work, I’ll retroactively heal what happened back then. I’ll prove I was lovable all along.” Sadly, once you fall into this trap, there are only two paths out.
Path one: get incredibly, cosmically lucky and find someone who carries those subtle, alluring red flags and doesn’t abandon you. This is possible but statistically unlikely—in the “chaos” ether, there just aren’t that many blobules of this outcome that can push their way into reality, even if you deploy magickal means.
Path two: grieve the idea that you will ever get closure from that specific type of person, and start dating fundamentally different people.
I urge you to choose path two.
(195 words)
The grief isn’t optional, btw. You’ve got to mourn the fantasy of going back and fixing the original wound. Which takes time. Time away from the apps and time spent re-parenting yourself.
But until you take that time, and process that grief, you’ll keep choosing path one. And when you keep choosing path one, you spawn more chaos blobules towards “nothing better.”
Chakra Misalignments, I believe in you (though I’m not sure I believe in chakra misalignments—what woo woo poppycock!). I believe you have the magickal capability a.k.a. basic human agency to spawn chaos blobules towards “healthy, long-term relationship.” In fact, whenever you feel a tug towards seeing a psychic, that’s the agentic part of you reminding you “conditions can change.”
What you’re not hearing is the rest of that sentence: “conditions can change … because of me.”
Want to submit your own question? Read this first.
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