This article appears in the Celestial Edition of Cassiopeia Media, written by the lovely Shabnam Sidhu and designed by Wiktoria Lesniewska. You can find more of Shabnam’s work here, and more from Wiktoria here.
The first time I considered paying for a psychic was when a man I barely knew stopped replying to me. I remember sitting in my room, flipping my phone face-down, then face-up again, over and over, as if repetition might change the outcome.
I reread our messages and replayed our conversations with the kind of attention usually reserved for solving a case gone cold. There was nothing. Still, I kept looking.
Eventually, I moved from messaging to interpretation. Instagram tarot accounts, horoscope experts, crystal selections – all of which flooded my feed – each confirming he would return, inevitably.
I did not book a reading. Instead, I felt content just lingering in the space that existed before it. That small suspended moment where interpretation still feels like control.
It is strange how quickly uncertainty becomes its own system. When nothing feels fixed, meaning starts to leak into everything.
Housing is abstractly unaffordable, groceries have quietly become a luxury category, and every headline is so outlandish it reads like satire. So silence starts to feel like something worth decoding rather than something that simply is.
It is in this atmosphere of not knowing that people cling to smaller systems of meaning – tarot cards, horoscopes, lucky charms, rituals – anything that offers even the illusion of control. I am no stranger to these systems.
A tarot spread becomes legible in hindsight. Draw the Tower or the Devil and it starts to feel explanatory. I sage my room when the “energy” feels off and do egg cleanses when clarity feels extractable.
Every Friday I leave a love charm by the window because it’s Venus’ day in Aphrodite (whatever that’s meant to mean), in hopes I attract the love of my life, preferably one who can split rent. Crystals remain for now, decorative.
Do I really know what I’m doing? Not really. Not because I don’t believe in any of it, but because certainty itself feels increasingly outsourced.
Which is probably why I’ve never had my fortune told by a professional. There’s something about putting my fate in someone else’s hands that scares me. What if I hear something I can’t un-know, something that makes interpretation feel less optional?
It is the not knowing that feels most thrilling, or the way it becomes meaning. I might be paving the path to my own undoing, but the hope is what keeps things alive.
There’s comfort in fortune telling – a refusal to let reality remain purely accidental without first trying to give it shape.
Because you don’t need things to be true to treat them like they are. Even if it’s all misread.
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