The Night I Booked My First Reading

I was sitting in my car outside a bar at 11 PM on a Tuesday, crying into a napkin I had stolen from the glove compartment, and I could not call my friends because every single one of them was tired of hearing about Sarah.

Sarah was not my girlfriend. Sarah was my “friend” who held my hand under the table at dinner, who texted me every morning, who told me I was the most important person in her life, and who was also dating a man named Trevor. I had been in love with Sarah for nine months. I had told exactly no one, because saying it out loud would make it real, and if it was real, I would have to do something about it.

So instead of calling a friend who would tell me what I already knew — that I was torturing myself, that Sarah was never going to leave Trevor, that I deserved someone who was actually available — I opened my phone and, for reasons I still cannot fully explain, searched for “psychic reading online.”

I had never done anything like this before. I was the practical one. The one who made spreadsheets for vacations and read peer-reviewed studies before buying vitamins. Psychic readings were for people who believed in crystals and Mercury retrograde — which, for the record, I now absolutely do. But that night, I was not looking for logic. I was looking for something that spoke to the part of me that logic could not reach.

I found Kasamba, picked a reader whose profile said she specialized in love and relationships, and started a chat session at 11:47 PM. I typed: “I’m in a complicated situation with someone. She’s my best friend and I think I’m in love with her, but she’s with someone else.”

The reader did not flinch at “she.” She did not redirect. She asked me to think about Sarah and then pulled cards.

What she told me changed the trajectory of the next year of my life.

What the Cards Said (And What I Was Not Ready to Hear)

The reader laid out a five-card spread and described what she saw. She said the connection between me and Sarah was genuine — that the energy between us was real and that Sarah was not performing or manipulating. She said Sarah had real feelings for me that she was terrified of.

Then she said the thing I did not want to hear: “This situation will not resolve itself. You are waiting for her to choose, and she is not going to choose. Not because she does not care, but because choosing means facing something about herself that she is not ready to face. The question is not what she will do. The question is how long you are willing to wait for someone else’s self-discovery.”

I stared at my phone screen in that dark parking lot and felt something crack open in my chest. Not because it was mystical or supernatural. Because it was true. A stranger on the internet had articulated the exact dynamic I had been living inside for nine months, and hearing it reflected back from outside my own spiraling thoughts gave it a weight and clarity that my internal monologue never could.

She also said something that I would not understand until months later: “There is a version of this story where you walk away and it is the catalyst she needs. And there is a version where you stay and you both remain stuck. But you will not know which version you are in until you move.”

I ended the session, drove home, and did not sleep.

The Slow Unraveling

I did not immediately take the reading’s advice. Of course I did not. I was in love, and love makes us do remarkably stupid things, regardless of how many tarot cards suggest otherwise.

But the reading planted a seed. Over the following weeks, I noticed myself observing the situation with slightly more distance. When Sarah texted me her usual morning message, I noticed the pattern instead of just feeling the dopamine hit. When she cancelled plans with me to be with Trevor, I registered the hurt instead of immediately rationalizing it away. The reading had given me a framework — not a prescription, but a lens through which to see what was actually happening versus what I wished was happening.

Three weeks after my first reading, I booked another one. Different platform this time — I tried Keen, partly out of curiosity and partly because I was not ready to hear the same message from the same reader. I asked a different question: “What do I need to understand about myself in this situation?”

This reader used tarot as well, and the reading was less about Sarah and more about me. She talked about a pattern of being drawn to unavailable people — not just romantically, but in friendships and even professional relationships. She described a tendency to find safety in longing rather than in having, because longing is familiar and having requires vulnerability that I had been avoiding since long before Sarah.

That one hit differently. It was not about Sarah anymore. It was about me, and the particular ways that being a queer woman who came out at 28 had shaped my relationship patterns. I had spent my twenties in a kind of emotional holding pattern — dating men I was not fully attracted to, forming intensely close friendships with women that always danced at the edge of something more, never quite landing in my own desire. The reading did not diagnose this. It illuminated it, gently, symbolically, through cards that somehow knew exactly where to press.

The Decision

Six weeks after that second reading, I told Sarah how I felt. Not because a psychic told me to — neither reader had directly advised that — but because the readings had stripped away enough of my self-deception that I could no longer pretend the situation was sustainable.

I will not dramatize what happened. Sarah cried. She said she had feelings for me too. She also said she was not ready to leave Trevor, not ready to tell her family, not ready to be “that kind of person.” Her words, not mine.

I told her I understood. And I told her I could not keep being her emotional anchor while she figured it out. That I was choosing myself.

It was the hardest conversation I have ever had. Walking away from someone you love because the timing and circumstances are wrong — because they are not ready for what you are ready for — is a particular kind of grief. It does not have the clean edges of a betrayal or a fight. It is just sad. Deeply, quietly sad.

The first reading had told me: “You will not know which version you are in until you move.” I moved. And the immediate aftermath was not clarity. It was devastation.

Reading Through the Grief

The three months after I walked away from Sarah were the worst of my adult life. Not because of the romantic loss alone, but because the loss triggered a cascade of other grief — grief about the years I spent closeted, grief about the relationships I never had because I was too afraid, grief about the gap between the life I had built and the life I actually wanted.

During this period, I leaned on psychic readings more than I am entirely comfortable admitting. I tried multiple platforms. I experimented with different types of readings. I was searching for something — not predictions about whether Sarah would come back, but something deeper. Anchoring, maybe. A sense that the chaos I was moving through had some kind of shape or direction.

A reading on Purple Garden was particularly impactful during this time. The reader, who conducted the session via video, did not do a love reading at all. She did a general life reading and focused almost entirely on personal transformation. She described what I was experiencing as a “Tower moment” — a reference to the tarot card that depicts a tower being struck by lightning, its inhabitants falling through the air.

“The Tower is not punishment,” she said. “It is liberation. The structure that is falling was not built to hold who you are becoming. It hurts to watch it crumble because you built it yourself, brick by brick, and you thought it was protecting you. But it was actually trapping you.”

I wept through the entire reading. Not because I believed in the mystical power of tarot cards. Because this woman, who knew nothing about me except the energy I was carrying into the session, had described my experience with precision that my own words had not managed.

The Tower was not just about Sarah. It was about the entire architecture of my pre-coming-out life — the straight-passing relationship patterns, the emotional unavailability masquerading as independence, the carefully constructed persona that kept me safe and kept me small. All of it was crumbling. And it needed to crumble.

What Psychic Readings Actually Gave Me

Looking back with the distance of time, I can be honest about what psychic readings did and did not do for me during this period.

They Did Not Predict the Future

None of the readers I consulted accurately predicted specific future events. Sarah did not “come back in three months” as one reader suggested. I did not “meet someone new at a social event in June” as another predicted. The specific, fortune-telling aspects of the readings were the least useful part.

They Did Provide a Mirror

What the readings excelled at was reflecting my present reality back to me in ways that I could not achieve on my own. When you are inside an emotional experience, you cannot see its shape. You are too close. A good psychic reader — like a good therapist, like a good friend — stands outside your experience and describes what they see. The symbolic language of tarot adds a layer of meaning that can bypass your rational defenses and speak directly to your emotional understanding.

They Honored the Full Complexity of My Experience

This is where psychic readings specifically served me as a queer woman in ways that other forms of guidance did not always manage. The readers I connected with on platforms like Kasamba and Keen treated my experience — loving a woman, coming out, grieving a closeted love, rebuilding my identity — with a seriousness and specificity that I had not always found elsewhere.

I was not a case study. I was not a representative of “the LGBTQ experience.” I was a specific woman with a specific heartbreak, and the best readers engaged with that specificity. They understood that my grief over Sarah was tangled up with grief about compulsory heterosexuality, that my fear of vulnerability in new relationships was connected to years of hiding, that my desire for spiritual guidance was itself an expression of searching for a framework that could hold all of who I am.

They Gave Me Permission to Trust Myself

This might be the most valuable thing of all. Every good reading I received, regardless of platform or style, ultimately pointed in the same direction: you already know what you need to do. The cards, the readers, the entire apparatus of psychic consultation — at its best, it functions not as an authority telling you what is true, but as a catalyst helping you access your own truth.

For a queer woman who spent years doubting her own feelings, ignoring her own desires, and deferring to external opinions about who she should be and how she should love, being told “trust yourself” by a spiritual practice that actually means it is quietly revolutionary.

The Other Side

It has been over a year since that night in the parking lot. I want to be honest about where things stand, because I think the integrity of this story depends on not wrapping it in a neat bow.

Sarah and I do not speak regularly anymore. The last time we talked, she told me she had broken up with Trevor. She did not say why, and I did not ask. I wished her well and meant it. But the door to that particular story had closed for me, and I had no desire to reopen it.

I am dating someone. Her name is not relevant, but the relationship is relevant to this story because of how different it feels from everything that came before. She is out. She is available. She is kind and direct and she does not make me guess about how she feels. The anxiety that characterized my connection with Sarah — the constant state of wanting, interpreting, hoping — is absent. In its place is something quieter and more solid that I would not have recognized as love a year ago, because I had confused love with longing for so long.

I still get psychic readings. Not with the frequency or desperation of that difficult period, but regularly — maybe once every couple of months. I approach them differently now. Less as a lifeline and more as a check-in. A way of stepping outside my own perspective and seeing what the cards have to say about where I am and where I am heading.

My current reader is a queer woman herself, someone I found on Purple Garden after testing several platforms. She understands the specific textures of sapphic life without me having to explain them, and our sessions feel less like consultations and more like conversations with a very wise friend who happens to have a tarot deck.

What I Would Tell Another Queer Woman Considering Psychic Readings

If you are where I was — crying in a car, heartbroken over someone you cannot have, questioning everything about your life and your identity — here is what I wish someone had told me.

The readings will not fix anything. They are not solutions. They are mirrors, maps, and sometimes flashlights in dark rooms. The fixing is your work. But having better tools for that work matters.

Find affirming readers or do not bother. A reader who does not understand or respect WLW relationships will give you a reading filtered through a lens that distorts your reality. You deserve guidance that sees you clearly. Platforms like Kasamba, Purple Garden, and Keen all have readers who specialize in or are experienced with queer relationships. Take the time to find them.

Start with chat if you are not ready to talk. I was not ready to say “I am in love with a woman” out loud to a stranger when I booked my first reading. Typing it was different. The distance of the screen gave me just enough safety to be honest. Several platforms offer chat-based readings, and for newly out or closeted women, this option can make the difference between seeking help and staying stuck.

Do not use readings to avoid making decisions. This is a trap I almost fell into. When you are facing a difficult choice — telling someone how you feel, ending a relationship, coming out to your family — it is tempting to keep getting readings instead of acting. The readings become a way of staying in the question so you never have to face the answer. At some point, you have to put the cards down and live.

Combine psychic readings with other support. During the hardest period, I was also seeing a therapist — a queer-affirming one who understood the specific complexities of what I was going through. The therapy provided clinical support for my mental health. The psychic readings provided spiritual and intuitive support for my sense of meaning and direction. Together, they covered more ground than either could alone.

Budget intentionally. Psychic readings cost money, and it is easy to overspend when you are emotional and seeking answers. Set a monthly budget for readings and stick to it. Most platforms offer introductory rates that make the first session affordable. Use those offers, find a reader you connect with, and then invest in that specific relationship rather than bouncing between readers hoping someone will tell you what you want to hear.

Your intuition is the real psychic. Every good reading I have ever received ultimately confirmed something I already sensed. The cards did not introduce foreign information — they illuminated what was already present in my awareness but buried under fear, denial, or confusion. The goal of a psychic reading is not to replace your intuition with someone else’s. It is to help you hear your own.

A Practice, Not a Cure

I do not believe that tarot cards are magic. I do not believe that psychic readers have supernatural powers. What I believe — based on my lived experience — is that the practice of seeking guidance outside your own ruminating mind, through symbolic systems interpreted by someone with developed intuition and empathy, can provide genuine value.

For queer women specifically, this value is amplified by the fact that so many traditional guidance systems — religion, family counsel, mainstream relationship advice — were not built with us in mind. Psychic readings, at their best, offer a space where your love, your identity, and your specific experience are the starting point, not an afterthought.

I found relationship clarity through psychic readings. Not all at once, and not in the way I expected. The clarity did not come as a prediction — “she will choose you” or “you will meet someone better.” It came as a gradually sharpening understanding of my own patterns, desires, fears, and capacity for the kind of love I actually wanted.

The cards showed me what I was ready to see. And that, it turns out, was enough.