“The internet witch who saved my life.”

But if I’m honest, there have been times in my life where therapy alone was not enough. In those times, I’ve turned to practitioners I’ll call Diviners: psychics, clairvoyants, tarot readers, channelers, and other folks of the ineffably mystical variety. My Diviners draw on skills and approaches unavailable to “real” therapists, who are bogged down by insurance claims and ethical imperatives designed by the American Psychological Association.

My first experience with a Diviner was on my eleventh birthday, when my mother took me to see a woman named Kay who told “vision stories” from her art studio.

This was a surprising move on the part of my mother, a devoted evangelical Christian. What she knew at the time is I’d gone full-blown insomniac over animal testing and the evisceration of the oceans and rainforests. Privately, I was contending with questions I dared not share with mother or therapist: questions like, “Why is a body?” and “How might I kiss Crystal without the consequence of eternal hellfire?” One thing was clear: I didn’t belong, and I was bullied for it. The gift my mother hoped to give me through Kay’s reading, I suspect, was the promise of a more bearable future.

Kay began the session by explaining she would only let good messages in. Then, in vivid and increasingly purple prose, she handed me metaphors that would guide me toward my future as a writer: I was a bird whose songs would echo over the water, reaching those most in need of reflection; I was a rose surviving the snow through an interconnected root system. Whether Kay was an instrument of the Divine or a would-be lyric essayist freestyling any metaphor that came to her, the reading genuinely moved and sustained me. It allowed me to believe I had a calling in life so inevitable that even the things I struggled with in and outside of therapy couldn’t stop it from coming to fruition.

When I emerged from Kay’s art basement into the still-bright evening, my mother’s idling car was waiting for me. “How did it go?” she yelled over the competing cacophony of Christian radio’s Top Ten Countdown. “Was there any blasphemy?”

✦

If Kay’s reading offered a blueprint of a better life to come, HW’s reading ensured I was around long enough to live it.

In 2020, a brutally contentious COVID divorce and increasingly chaotic oxycontin addiction landed me back in my parents’ guestroom, a difficult place for me to be in even the best of circumstances. I was still devastated by the loss of my maternal grandmother, the only person in my family with whom I’d felt truly close. We shared a unique bond, sealed by a secret greeting we’d performed since I was a baby in which we’d touch index fingers and say, in unison, “Pookie!” My grandmother loved and looked after me fiercely every day of her life, and I was heartbroken that I hadn’t been able to get home in time to say goodbye.

A concerned friend secured for me a coveted appointment with HW, a popular internet witch, and I reluctantly agreed to attend. Two seconds into our zoom call, the witch informed me my ancestors were coming through very clearly with the message that the opioids would kill me within months if I didn’t quit. Furious that I’d been lured into an intervention disguised as a reading, I told the witch she was full of shit and demanded proof, something only my ancestors would know.

She looked defiantly into the camera, pointed at me with one long black acrylic fingernail, and said: “Pookie.”

In that moment, I felt my soul rocket from and return to my body. I began tapering off oxy the following day and never touched it again.

✦

I’d like to believe the darkest parts of my life are behind me, but I struggle every Sisyphean day — with managing a mood disorder, doomscrolling through the downfall of democracy, setting boundaries with a complex family, leaving someone I love who isn’t right for me.

As I contend with all the cumbersome earth-work of being human, I return as often as possible to my trusted tarot reader, who begins each session by creating a circle of safety free of negative energies, attended by sacred ancestral guides. I’m surprised every time how moved I feel by this ritual — by someone going to great lengths to care for me and keep me safe.

Of course, therapy creates safe spaces, too. Grounded in the unpacking of difficult, specific truths, therapy allows me to work through anything I’m brave enough to tackle. A tarot reading, on the other hand, is grounded in symbolism and metaphor, allowing for endless interpretation and reinterpretation. Therapy narrows the scope, and Divining opens it wide.

Something skilled therapists and Diviners share is that they’re often ten steps ahead of us. They know the experiences and realizations necessary for our repair and evolution. A therapist’s job is to withhold prescient knowledge, encouraging us to discover it ourselves, while a Diviner’s job, I think, is to double down on that prescience — to reassure us the future exists and is worth pursuing. For the Diviner, it isn’t unethical or interfering to offer what the therapist must often withhold: the thing we most need or want to hear.

“In the dark times,” writes Brecht, “there will be singing about the dark times.” So stack your chorus, honey, with every worthy healer who comes your way. Skepticism is healthy, but most powerful when paired with an open mind. Allow yourself to enter that sacred circle. Ask yourself if you’re ready to be changed.

Then tell your therapist all about it.

Did Piper’s essay leave you with some big ol’ metaphysical questions? Check out Season 2 of The Telepathy Tapes, especially Episode 2, “Mediumship Under the Microscope.” Host Ky Dickens and her motley crew of interviewees — world-renowned neuroscientists, rigorously certified mediums, and an 11-year old non-speaker receiving messages from both the living and the dead — had us fully convinced that Piper’s grandmother isn’t the only voice out there in the ether.

Ready to seek out some otherworldly healing of your own? Piper trusts the Hauswitch Psychic Portal for recommendations. Broaden your search on Queer Healers, where you can filter by location, modality, and identity to find a trustworthy pro offering everything from astrology to past-life regression to intergalactic soul retrieval…or just some good ol’ fashioned acupuncture or massage.

More of a tarot guy? Check out this article about Pamela Colman Smith, the artist behind the famous Rider-Waite deck. “There is not a page of her life, not an incident, that is not overflowing with romance,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote of Smith in 1904. If you ask us, she sounds pretty divine.