I Went to Rachel Dratch's Psychic 🔮

desperate times call for desperate measures

I am fully aware that the recent election results do not just affect me personally, but I have to admit I have been struggle bussing a lot around this topic.

Last night I found myself feeling pretty resentful about it all. Not just for the doom and gloom it has ushered into the collective, but also for the ways I have found it to be nearly impossible to create a boundary around thinking or talking about it. I’ve been obsessing over the injustice of it all, all the people who are now in harm’s way, and the insanity of prominent democrats like Obama talking about the “peaceful transition of power” when that power is a fascist dictatorship.

As I told my therapist, I feel sick to my soul.

I also don’t mean to be dramatic. It’s just, I’ve worked so hard on my mental health the past few years, and this has felt like such a major setback in that department.

I just haven’t been able to see a future at all. It is pitch black. Again, I know I’m not alone in this.

One of the things that has brought me some comfort and pleasure this year is “Woo Woo with Rachel Dratch.” In the first episode, Rachel shares a story about visiting a psychic medium who told her, when she was like 42 or 43, that she would have a child.

Rachel said she remembered hearing this and thinking something like, “yeah right lady.” She said she had already made peace with the fact that that ship had sailed, and she wondered if perhaps the reading was referring to an adoption of sorts, or a more general “being a mother vibe” to young people in her life.

Then a few months later she met her baby daddy and had a son.

These days, I’m a woman who is becoming increasingly aware of the reality of biological clocks and making decisions around that notion, while simultaneously grappling with a radioactively toxic patriarchal society that makes the very idea of dating men and bringing children into this world feel like both a betrayal of self and a cruel act. So Rachel’s story resonated with me. I’d like to believe I have a little more time than I feel like I have left, especially if this fucking nonsense is truly going to last at least until I turn 40.

Before the election I told myself, if the worst case scenario happens, I will give myself permission to go visit Rachel’s psychic in hopes of receiving a similar message.

Then the worst case scenario happened.

I try not to go to psychics.

I’ve always had kind of an anxious relationship to the future. I’ve always been desperate for reassurances no one can really give me. I’ve always wanted someone to tell me it’s all going to be okay and to somehow believe them.

This has led me to a pretty solid knowledge of tarot and astrology.¹

But as for trusting other people with my future? Ever since my Irish Tea Leaf Lady from the 3rd Street Promenade disappeared I’ve been relatively sober from psychics. Enough were wrong that it felt like a scam.

I even stopped trying to make my own predictions. It just seemed… mentally healthier to focus my efforts on meditation and living in the present moment, etc. etc.

Anyway, things have changed. I needed to pay someone more money than I really have so they could tell me they saw something, anything, ahead for me. Ideally something positive.

I pulled up to a house on a hill that over looked the sea. The psychic² came to greet me and I entered her office space which proudly displayed her art, which I very much enjoyed.

She was an 80 year old woman who had the vibes of a woman in her late 60s.³

I suppose it would be somewhat uninteresting for me to rehash the entire hour reading she gave me, so I’ll try to just point to what I got out of the experience.

First of all, she channels a spirit guide of hers, who has a different affectation and way of speaking than she does, and so I figured even if it’s truly all made up then I still basically bought a ticket for an interesting private performance.

I have to admit her work didn’t feel totally made up though. There was a lot she got very right. I didn’t even really need that from her though.⁴ As I said, I mostly just needed her to tell me the world wasn’t going to actually end in spite of appearances and that my desire to one day find love wasn’t as dead as it feels.

She did graciously assure me that there was still a future, for both the world and myself.

In fact, one of the pieces she said that I found to be the most hopeful was that in eight years the world would be better than it has ever been in my lifetime.

She said the current state of affairs was like when you put soap in a bottle that is dirty and then shake it up to clean it out.

She could tell I was very down and out about the political situation, without me explicitly saying so.

She said something like, “this won’t last very long.”

She said that part of the reason I am so crushed by it is because it triggers stuff about my personal experiences in life.

Well, duh. It doesn’t take a psychic to know that having a rapist as a president-elect a second time around even after the #MeToo movement might be a little triggering for a lot of women.

But she reminded me that the media, society, etc. tells stories that elicit my fear because they want my money, which is true enough, and that I had the power to tell different stories.

That was, in fact, the main kernel of wisdom I took away from our session. Her spirit guide even said I need to start writing happier endings to my stories.

I always try to write happy endings in my fictional work, but I think this advice especially applies to the stories I tell myself in my head about my lived experience.

I feel like I’ve been bracing myself for a reboot of the holocaust, and the psychic made me feel like these fears were somewhat unfounded.

Instead she said I would meet a romantic interest in about three months, and she wasn’t sure if I would marry him or not, but maybe I would, and that I could have up to two kids according to my palm, but I probably would only have one.

She did the thing I had essentially hired her to do, which is reassure me that I won’t die in nuclear war⁵ and that the world would one day be a more peaceful place before my eggs dried up so that having hypothetical children with a hypothetical man⁶ who was safe and loving would be an ethical choice.

So then I was like, well, if she’s a medium I might as well ask about my great-grandma.

I really loved my great-grandma. She essentially raised me as a kid because my mom was going to college⁷ and my grandma was working.

A lot of what came up in the conversation about my great-grandma was super accurate, especially in terms of my family’s dynamics. Sometimes she was so accurate she made me laugh.

But again, I wasn’t really there for the accuracy. I was there for the help in telling a different story.

Since my great-grandma passed away in 2021, most of my dreams with her have been… a little sad.

In some she still had dementia and wasn’t aware she had died and so was stuck in some kind of limbo space. In others she was a ghost in her house and wouldn’t leave.

So that was mostly what I wanted to know. Was she still “stuck in limbo” or had she moved to the light, or whatever it is people do when they die?

The psychic told me my great-grandma was definitely in the heavenly realms or vibrations or whatever they are now, but that she was allowed to be a ghost that haunted me.

Look, I’m not completely out to lunch⁸. I am fully aware that maybe death is literally just nothing at all.

I think this all just pointed me back to what she said about the stories we tell ourselves, and how they can impact us.

I had a few dreams where my great-grandma was still struggling, and then I took that feeling to heart… and now someone was telling me she was okay.

I have literally no way of knowing what is real about life after death, if anything. I have no way of really knowing if my great-grandma’s soul is okay or not, or if she’s just plain dead.

Without any concrete evidence to know anything really, and with very little power to change her circumstances even if I did have a vague clue, I realized it helps, in this case, to believe whatever it feels better to believe.

Hey, I did pay this woman $200 to either pretend to or legitimately talk to a spirit guide who can talk to my deceased loved one. She is definitely accurate that the story that my loved one is okay is better for my nervous system than the story that she is having a hard time.

The psychic did get some things wrong though.

She said my great-grandma came in with smoky lungs, like she smoked in her life and had lung problems. I think it’s possible my great-grandma might have smoked in her life, but if so it was definitely before I was born. I have no memory of her smoking, ever. And her lungs are not what took her out.

A different great-grandma did smoke, but we were not close at all. I dunno.

The psychic also said I had a sweet tooth and needed to stop eating so many sweets. I am famous in my family for not having a sweet tooth. We’ll go on vacations and everyone in my family will get ice cream except me. When I was a kid my mom offered to let me have ice cream for dinner once and I was like, “I want real food.” So… that was just, not true.⁹

There was one other thing about our reading that really got me was toward the end. She was telling me about this hypothetical child I might have, and she asked me not to vaccinate the kid because it “interrupts the spiritual vibrations.”

I… like vaccines. In fact, RFK Jr.’s appointment to the Department of Health was one of the many points of contention I’ve been spiraling on lately. I literally made a doctor appointment for December with the plan to get juiced up with as many vaccines as possible in the event that they go away forever and I have to survive the next four years without them.

I did not argue with the psychic about vaccines.

I just said, “Huh!!”

It was the kind of “huh” that was like, “Oh huh! No vaccines for my hypothetical child to prevent autism you say?? What an interesting perspective that is not at all controversial for you to present to me!!”

She said, “there’s a lot of misinformation out there.”

And I thought, “boy is there.”

I will still get vaccinated whenever it is appropriate and available. If I ever have a child I would get them vaccinated. But… I guess if for whatever reason I do end up living in a world that deprives me of them, then according to this lady, that was actually for the best and I will still live to 100 and my hypothetical unvaccinated child will be super healthy.

In a weird, fucked up way though, I did find this to be helpful. Here I am, totally freaking out about my future health in an anti-vaxx world, and here is this lady warning me against the very thing that I feel very passionately is in my best interest.

This part of the conversation made me feel like, “how I learned to stop worrying and love the new health administration.”

Time will tell if I meet a boyfriend in three months.

Time will tell if this emerging fascist regime lasts or not.

Time will tell if the world is the best it has ever been in my lifetime in eight years.

Time will tell if I live to be 100 years old.

I am not necessarily counting on any of this to be true, just as I didn’t really need her to guess so many names about the people in my life.¹⁰

But, even though I didn’t really share any of it here due to it being personal in nature, a lot of what the psychic said was spot on and there was truly no way she could have known a lot of what she did get right.

So what do I believe after all this? I think the thing can say with the most clarity is there is more that I still don’t know than what I do know. Yet for whatever reason, the psychic did help me feel reassured that there is more to this moment and to this existence than meets the eye.

I appreciated her legitimate wisdom that when it comes to the unknown, a lot of what we actually experience comes down to the stories we tell ourselves about it.

After we were done with the reading, she showed me the view from her house, which included the ocean and the Trump golf course as the winds blew forcefully around us.

1. I am more so into astrology, because in my years of paying attention to it I’ve found it checks out and it’s more like a weather report for vibes than a prediction of actual events, which feels realistic.

2. I am going to call her “the psychic” here and not mention her by name. If you are interested, I am happy to share her information. Overall I enjoyed and appreciated my experience. She does also have an interesting background. However, since I am going to say some of the things she got wrong, I don’t want to like, put her on blast publicly.

3. Like, I wasn’t nervous when she was walking around the house.

4. I do already buy into the idea of the supernatural and other dimensions enough that I was not there to judge her for her work. I think some people go into this stuff wanting the reader to say things they couldn’t possibly know about them otherwise so they can “prove its real” and I’m like, whatever. Who is to say what’s real anymore anyway.

5. She said I would live until I was 100!! I told her it really didn’t feel that way to me at all, but hey, she’s the psychic I guess.

6. She also emphasized that the guy would be FUNNY and I was like, “yes okay that’s a good sign this is real”

7. she had me when she was 19 and wanted to make something of herself

8. I am just on a quick lunch break, if anything

9. This might make it seem like I just don’t like ice cream. I do like ice cream. I just don’t crave sweets and I know they aren’t great for me so I intentionally don’t eat a lot of sugar.

10. She guessed a couple names. One name she guessed right was my living grandma’s name.