Desperation, in my case, the only time in my life I let myself be persuaded by a friend to go to someone her sisters had laced was uncannily accurate. I was at a really low point —- had dropped out of an MA, returned from a stint living in the US after a run of bad luck knocked my confidence, then had an accident that meant I couldn’t walk for six months and had to move out of the flat I shared with my boyfriend (inaccessible) back in with my parents and claim benefits. I was applying for postgraduate places overseas but feeling spectacularly low and stalled when I saw the psychic. I’m a total skeptic and I knew I was being an idiot, but I think I thought that any grain of fake hope for the future would keep me going.
Of course it was a combination of bollocks and the Barnum effect, but what strikes me now is that she predicted me the kind of future she clearly thought was great — I’d asked if I would ever live overseas or study again, and she said a firm no to both, as she clearly didn’t think either was a ‘good future’, and probably also I looked poor and ground-down and unhealthy and unambitious and she thought I was deluded, and felt that someone of 24 should be ‘settling down’ — but that I would start a business with my boyfriend, buy a house and have a baby within the year, and settle in my home city.
Within eight months, I’d been offered and accepted a major scholarship to Oxford, did two further degrees, and lived abroad for the best part of the next 20 years. My boyfriend and I have never had a business, our first property was a London flat years later, and we only had a child fifteen years after the ‘reading’.
If I’d presented as more middle-class, and had looked less neglected and unwell, I’m sure the nature of the bollocks would have been a bit different.