There is a woman in Florida who will be very upset if she ever reads this. Of course, she probably already knows I am working on it. Right now. Even though there is no way anyone could have told her.
You see, she is a psychic.
In November of 2004, I was extremely depressed. My mood was so low, I wouldn’t answer the phone, was sleeping twelve hours at a time, couldn’t imagine leaving my boyfriend’s apartment.
It was right after the election, and though that would have been reason enough, there were other factors. I’ve experienced depressions since I was fifteen years old and I take medication for it, but sometimes those magical pills don’t work, no matter what fancy new combination is added to the regimen.
This was one of those times, and I didn’t know what to do.
I was coming down from the high of having my first novel published the previous spring; now I was struggling with my second, unsure whether I could tackle the broader canvas I had committed myself to. I was also in a relationship that, while stable, I didn’t find emotionally or intellectually fulfilling. I would go to bed at night feeling lonely in my boyfriend’s expensive sheets, even though he was lying six inches away from me.
I would also be turning thirty in two months, which terrified me—in retrospect, a triviality, but no less dire a situation at the time. When the darkness is closing in on the mind of a depressed person, when everything seems bleak, when there is a gray, mushy tint clouding his vision, he will do anything to fix the problem.
I did something most would consider crazy, though I did it to get out of the crazy. I booked myself on a flight to Boca Raton to see a psychic healer who was renowned for shifting people’s energy around and getting them out of all sorts of maladies. I was, and am, aware that this puts me in a small fraction of the population that has believed in such mystical dogma. But I figured no harm could be done; all I had to lose was money and time.
Or so I thought.
Sondra had come highly recommended by some family friends on the West Coast; she had reportedly cured their infant daughter of a life-threatening illness. Surely a garden-variety depression would be easy. After speaking to her on the phone for about fifteen minutes, I scheduled myself, with incredible blind faith, for three days of sessions, which was the amount of time she recommended.
I imagined my little trip to Florida as an esoteric rest cure, a departure from my life in the West Village.
Traveling alone isn’t easy when you’re despondent. But once on the plane, I started feeling hopeful; I pictured myself journeying to an exotic healing mecca, like Lourdes or Bath or Rajasthan.
The only people who knew where I was going were my boyfriend and my mother. For anyone else who asked, I was in Florida on business. Because it was terribly likely that a novelist working on a book set in New England would be doing research in Boca Raton.
I arrived on a Sunday evening at a grand, palatial hotel that wasn’t too far from being a Floridian version of the Taj Mahal. It had a pink exterior, with magnificent 1920s architecture and a lobby decorated with palm trees and monkeys. Except for the staff, everyone else was at least thirty years older than I was.
The next morning, I met Sondra at her home office a few miles away, where she lived and worked in a condominium complex. While clean, it was extremely modest, a far cry from the waterfront luxury of the resort. The room where she practiced was decorated with stuffed animals, images of angels, and the other types of new age paraphernalia that tend to offend me more on an aesthetic than a spiritual level.
I sensed, though, that she was a good person. She was a slight, wiry woman in her early sixties, with curly brown hair. She gave me a hug upon meeting me, and I felt her bony spine. She might have weighed ninety-five pounds. Her accent was Florida by way of south Jersey; while her message could have come out of a holistic wellness center in Santa Monica, her delivery was that of a sassy Brooklyn diner waitress.
Some would be put off, but I found it charming.
We sat down, and she explained her philosophy. Most of it—apart from the hands-on healing part—didn’t seem terribly different from concepts I had encountered in various self-help books over the years. She had healed people all over the world; articles had been written about her and her work.
“Do I believe in this?” she said to me. “I know it works. We need to keep your energy field as clear as we possibly can, because that’s what we’re in charge of.”
When I asked her about her use of the royal “we,” she said she was referring to herself and her spirit guides. I dismissed it as a quirk of the profession, in the same way that I would ignore an auto mechanic’s or manicurist’s improper grammar.
We did two healing sessions a day, lasting about thirty minutes each; I lay on a massage table, clothes on, eyes shut. The basic concept was that we all have an energy field that extends eighteen inches in every direction; some people, like her, have the power to move this energy around, unblocking it, refocusing it. As she moved her hands over me, I could actually hear a crackling in the air. I would feel alternating sensations of heat and cold over my body; I could hear her murmuring as she did her work, as if she were communicating with some higher power.
I was exhausted after the first day, though I also felt as if a tremendous weight had been lifted. Still, I had my doubts. During the drive back to the hotel, I stopped at an intersection of strip malls and fast food restaurants; I was behind a truck with a bumper sticker that read, “Welcome To Florida. Now Go Home.”
Maybe I should have.
“I don’t think you should write this essay,” my mother tells me on the phone, calling from San Francisco. I have asked her to verify some of the chronology of it, which has unfortunately necessitated telling her what it’s about.
“Why not?”
“Because people might think you’re crazy. And do you really want everyone to know you were that depressed?”
“What does it matter? Most writers are a little bit crazy. It’s about having interesting experiences; that’s part of why I did it. And I’m not depressed anymore. Besides, if you’re going to talk about depressed writers, I think I’m in pretty good company. Most of the writers I respect have been at one point or another.”
“It just seems ungrateful, after everything she did for you. She helped you.” Though I would hardly describe my mother as new age, to her, if something works, who cares how it works?
“I’m not being ungrateful. I paid her. I don’t owe her anything. I’m telling my side of things. I’m not writing anything that isn’t my truth.”
“Okay,” she says, in a voice that tells me she’s not convinced. And then, more quietly: “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I’m not going to get hurt,” I say. “Trust me.”
The healing sessions were one thing, but what I wasn’t prepared for were Sondra’s psychic abilities. If I encountered a psychic on the street, on television, or on a hotline I was supposed to call, I would be suspect. But there in Florida, away from my everyday life, and after paying a considerable amount of money, I wanted to believe.
We had long, intense discussions when we weren’t doing the healing sessions, in the morning and afternoon, breaking only for lunch, when I would go back to the hotel. They were very much like therapy, except that they incorporated Sondra’s psychic talents. Whenever I asked her a question that had to do with the future—and she made it clear that I shouldn’t ask her anything I wasn’t prepared to hear the answer to—her eyes went to my left side, her pupils skittering off to some other, unworldly place. She started by talking about a lot of stuff that had happened to me in the past, all events she had no way of knowing about. As I feasted on these little crumbs of truth, she began telling me about my future. When I would break up with my boyfriend, whom she said was not right for me (I already knew that, thanks). How many books I would publish. And when I would meet the next guy, who was going to be the love of my life, a man with whom I would truly connect.
She told me many things during those three days, some of them nutty, some of them sane, many of them prophetic, and quite a few that turned out to be dead-on accurate.
Of course, I focused on the guy.
She was quite specific: I would meet him in September of the following year. We would be at a dinner party, and he would be wearing a white shirt. Or giving off some kind of white glow. She couldn’t be sure. Given my growing faith in Sondra and the absolute despair from which I was emerging, I believed her.
I finished up the three days in Florida feeling tired, but hopeful and relieved. She instructed me was that I wasn’t to go to the gym for seventy-two hours after the last session, and I wasn’t allowed to have sex, either. The former was no problem; as for the latter, I think I lasted two and a half days.
The real proof was in the coming weeks and months. I got through the rest of the fall, the holiday season, and my thirtieth birthday with relative happiness. My dark mood, seemingly without fanfare, had lifted. I finished a first draft of the new novel. By the end of winter, I was strong enough, sad as it was, to break up with the boyfriend. I thought, somehow, that Sondra had made it all happen, that she had banished the negative energy that was keeping me down. I went into spring feeling free.
My regular therapist, a woman named Molly who is the exact opposite of Sondra—blond, robust, fair-skinned, and from the heartland—was not happy about any of this. She didn’t say it outright, but I knew. It wasn’t so much that she was threatened by my seeing another therapist; I think she didn’t trust Sondra’s methods. But I had become a believer. And when you are a believer, every bit of evidence serves as proof of your faith while you ignore anything that might sway you to the contrary side.
That is, until something royally fucks up.
I would continue to seek Sondra’s advice over the next year, twice when she made visits to New York, and during several phone sessions. She assured me that the psychic line was even better over the phone. There were fewer distractions than in a face-to-face meeting. The phone line was pure electrical energy. Logical, right?
I thought so at the time.
She became my fast-talking Florida guru, the woman I turned to—more than my friends, parents, or therapist—when I needed advice at a critical juncture. I grew addicted to finding out what she thought about people or situations or business dealings. I started feeling guilty, in fact, that I had an inside line, though she assured me she would never reveal information that would hurt anyone. Sondra, after all, could tell me things about people I knew! I learned about their sex lives, their family troubles, their shady transactions. What could be better than that? It was like overhearing gossip without any of the drawbacks. And at only $150 an hour!
I didn’t always take her advice; when making decisions, I relied on intuition, friends, and the powers of Google as well. But more than anything, I wanted to believe what Sondra said was true, because it would validate that one event I was holding on to: the guy I would meet in the fall.
Those summer months were happy and productive, if only a bit lonely. I dated some, but eventually decided there was no point. After all, it was in September when I would meet him, not earlier. And my God, if I got serious with anyone much sooner than that, I might jinx the whole thing!
So when I did meet a young man whom I liked very much, and though it was not in September, but at the very end of August, and he was wearing not a white shirt but a yellow one, and we were not at a dinner party, but on a first date at an Italian restaurant on Hudson Street that admittedly did have a long line of tables close to each other along a window banquette that was almost like a dinner party, I fell for him.
Over the next two months, I stopped seeing my friends as often, spent nearly every moment with him, sent and received gifts, went out to long dinners, even took a trip to Los Angeles where we vacationed at the Chateau Marmont.
He told me he loved me, gave me silly nicknames, said he could imagine never dating anyone else again.
He suggested things that meant real commitment in my mind, like getting a couples membership at an independent film society or taking a weekend road trip to the Berkshires. When I came back from eight days in San Francisco celebrating my parents’ wedding anniversary, he said he never wanted to be apart from me for that long again.
My confidence about my new boyfriend was so high that I let myself plunge headfirst into those murky, deceptive waters of early-stage love. I paid no attention to contradictory signs: the fact that he’d never had a relationship lasting more than four months; that though he was enormously talented, he had no steady employment and was bouncing from one friend’s couch to another; that he had an annoying fag hag who constantly hung around and openly admitted her jealousy of us. I ignored it all, because I was convinced we could overcome these problems.
What I also ignored was the lingering thought that I should call Sondra to ask if he was the right person.
I was afraid what she might say.
All I knew was that he made me happy, happier than I’d been in a long time, and I didn’t want anything, or anyone, to ruin that.
So when this young man turned out not to be the love of my life, but rather a bit of a creep, when he left my apartment one night after slamming the keys I had given him down on the kitchen table, when he told me he wasn’t cut out for relationships, that there had never really been anything between us, that I was too difficult, too much of a perfectionist, too high maintenance, I was not so much sad as I was angry. A very expensive psychic, after all, one whom I had flown down to Florida to see, had told me he would be the one! The one is not supposed to slam keys down on the kitchen table. The one is not supposed to walk out of your life two months after you start dating him.
The next evening was Halloween. I felt pathetic as I walked home through the cacophonous, revelry-laden streets of the Village. I had left my friends behind for this guy, and though they would all eventually be there for me, I wasn’t ready to go crawling back. I was still in too much shock.
A month later, after a bleak November, it occurred to me to call Sondra.
“He looks like the one, feels like the one,” she told me. “But you went too fast. You changed the script. You expect everything at once. You want it all. The romance is the icing on the cake. You have to build a strong foundation first.”
Good advice, I thought. Maybe he had been the one. Maybe I had gone too fast. (Yes, I had definitely gone too fast. That much, even without a psychic, was obvious to me.)
“I see the number seven,” she said. “It’s not seven days, but it might be seven weeks, or seven months.”
He would be coming back, she said.
Seven weeks seemed preferable, but I would have settled for seven months.
I held on to that damned seven, keeping it in the back of my mind as seven weeks and then seventy days passed, with no word from him. My mood became even more despondent than it had been a year ago. I stopped going out, stopped dating, was writing less than I would have liked.
I was also intensely angry at the young man and at Sondra. But mostly, I was angry at myself for screwing up so completely, for ignoring all the conventional wisdom about relationships I usually try to follow: Go slow. Weigh out your options. Don’t expect too much, too soon. Don’t try to change him. And for God’s sake, don’t give him the keys to your apartment three weeks after the first date!
Then, in March, the young man did come back.
Aha! I thought. Sondra was right. This is it. He’s changed.
No, he had not.
He wanted to be friends. He was sorry for hurting me; he wrote me several long, sweet, romantic e-mails talking about what a good time we had had together. But long, sweet, romantic e-mails are not the same as getting back together.
I was convinced, though, that if we saw each other in person, all the feelings would return. We had an awkward dinner during which I had nothing to say until I finally let loose everything I had been feeling for the past five months. What makes you so fucking special that you don’t do relationships? And what makes you think you can treat someone this way and then just walk out of his life?
He had no good answers for these questions. He was rude, defensive. Though I was still physically attracted to him, I was sad to realize he was a person I no longer wanted to know.
At the end of our nondate together, I ran into a friend who was out with a girlfriend of his. “Save me,” I whispered to them. “Don’t ask questions—we’re going out for drinks now.”
I turned back to the young man, gave him a big hug, lied that it was great to see him, and said good-bye. It was the last time I spoke to him.
When Sondra sent a postcard and left me two voice mails telling me she would be seeing clients in Manhattan in June, I didn’t respond. She sent an e-mail a week later—“a loving reminder,” she called it—asking me again if I would like to make an appointment. I wrote her back, saying I wished her the best on her trip, but I would not be booking a session.
I wondered, if she could see the whole story, why she didn’t sense my unhappiness with her advice. I wondered why she had needed to contact me four times. And I wondered, after more than a year of knowing her, if she was so psychic, why didn’t her number accept blocked caller IDs?
When I asked my mother these questions, I could almost hear her shrugging over the phone. “Well,” she said, “maybe she’s not psychic about everything.”
Friends who’ve heard this story always ask me whether I thought Sondra was an elaborate faker. I don’t think so. She did get me out of my depression. Perhaps it was by unblocking some of the negative energy in which I was mired—I’ll never know for sure—but mostly I believe it was by giving me hope. By telling me that I would meet someone new, that my career prospects were bright, that my family loved me, she helped make lucid my perception of the future.
She went wrong, of course, in her specificity. Thanks to her, I focused on a man in the fall who may never have existed. That fantasy got me through the year, but I shouldn’t have relied on it once September came.
I decided, after the actual young man left for good, that life was best lived moment by moment, that I was the only one who could give order to it.
Still, I am reminded of those three days in Boca Raton: the balmy weather, the pink hotel, the strip malls, the apartment complex, the departure from my everyday life. The fact that so few people knew where I was, I could have disappeared entirely. The idea that I was leaving a piece of myself behind and returning a new person.
And I admit, despite everything, that a part of me still holds on to that narrative, the one all single people have in some form or another, the one Sondra gave me, of meeting that knight in white-shirted armor.
I know he’s out there.
It doesn’t have to be in September.
Really, any month would be fine.