![No Spoilers, Please [Dear Thursday]](http://fierceandnerdy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/palmistry.jpg)
No Spoilers, Please [Dear Thursday]
There’s this thing that used to happen to me all of the time in my 20s. I’d be on the street with a friend or sometimes just walking around a store, when a woman would approach me, tell me she was a psychic and that she was getting a very interesting reading off of me. Would I like her to read my aura or my palm or just my general being for [insert small amount of money here]? Being cynical down to my very core, I always answered no. Not just because I believed I was being hustled (sadly, I’m one of those people who believes that any stranger who approaches me about anything, even directions, is a potential hustler), but also because I don’t like spoilers, whether they be fictional or IRL.
“Thank you, but I don’t want to know,” I’d tell these possibly real, possibly fake psychics, then I’d go’on about my business. The truth is, whether the end of the story is good or bad, I just want to be surprised.
But how about you? Have you ever been to a psychic? Did what they predicted turn out to be true? Or do you, like me, prefer to live spoiler-free?
I did visit a psychic once, just once, back when I was 20, and we ran into one in a Chinese temple, about eight months after my mother died. He said that I was very sad now, but that I would eventually feel better. He also said that my life would be filled with many successes and excitement. Then he gave the friend I was with some incense and told her that she needed to go to a certain statue in the temple and pray, because he saw some very dark things in her future, but maybe she could alleviate them through prayer. It was brutal and as I walked with the friend to the statue to pray, we discussed whether or not the psychic was for real. Could it be that he really hadn’t liked her for some reason — maybe because she was white, also if she could change the course of her predicted future, wouldn’t I be able to change the course of mine? Either way, the whole thing, which was supposed to be a lark ended up freaking both of us out. To some extent when you agree to a reading you give these people power over you, and perhaps that’s not something we should give random people. Also, I wonder if we had known about our infertility struggles from the get go if it would have really ordered our steps. I know if someone had just flat out told me that I wouldn’t be conceiving a second child, I probably still would have tried. So really, why bother with psychics? As for my friend, she ended up staying in China, married a Chinese man, and I never heard from her again, so who knows.