The first time I saw a psychic was in the late 1990s. I was in my early thirties, living in Vancouver and newly married. When a friend invited me to get a reading with Carole, a visiting psychic medium from Ontario, I went along on a whim.

Before we arrived, I was skeptical that psychic abilities were real. I took my wedding ring off on the way to the appointment so Carole wouldn’t have any clues about my life. But without knowing anything about me but my first name, she picked up that I was married, albeit unhappily. Somehow, she knew I was a writer. What really impressed me was when she channelled my deceased grandmother, telling me about her emphysema, a song she loved to sing, the name of her best friend and an unusual nickname she called her sister. By the end of the reading, I was blown away.

That visit opened my mind to the possibility that some people can access information most of us can’t. Soon, I was visiting psychics and tarot readers two or three times a year, often with friends. I especially liked card readings. They were light, fun. But I was also fascinated by psychics’ abilities. It was thrilling when they pulled a small detail about me out of thin air, or when a prediction came true. I didn’t take it too seriously; it became a hobby of sorts.

A few years after my first psychic reading, my marriage ended (just as Carole had predicted), and I moved to Victoria to start over. There, I met another type of psychic: an intuitive counsellor who used her abilities to help people on a deeper, more spiritual level. I saw her regularly, and she helped me heal from my divorce and process the baggage I had around relationships. This is when I realized that psychic readings could be more than fun—with the right reader, they could be healing.

In my late thirties and throughout my forties, I visited spiritual and intuitive counsellors when I needed to, like after a breakup or when a relationship was going poorly (which was a lot of the time). In other areas of my life, I was thriving. I built a communications consultancy that supported causes I was passionate about, like justice and human rights. I had close friendships, travelled a lot and owned my home in Victoria, a century-old bungalow I painted pink. But while a relationship was something I desperately wanted, I could never get one to work. My love affairs were always off-balance; either I was all in and they were distant, or vice versa. The advice most intuitives gave me was pretty consistent: learn to love yourself. This felt like an unsolvable riddle. How could I love myself if I didn’t know what receiving love felt like?

I’d tried conventional therapies in the past, but they never worked for me. Whereas traditional counsellors let me do all the talking and draw my own conclusions, intuitives shared relevant insights and guidance.

During those years, seeing psychics wasn’t something I felt embarrassed about. These experiences enhanced my life by making me think more deeply about how to be a better person and how to be happier. At most, I did a few readings each month and I never spent more than about $120 for an hour-long session. And while I consulted psychics more than other people I know, I had it under control. But that all changed when I had a life crisis—and discovered online psychic platforms.

In the fall of 2014, a few months before I turned 50, I found myself at a crossroads. I was burned out from work and, aside from a few disappointing dates, had been single for a couple of years. I put love on the backburner to focus on another dream: living on a Gulf Island and writing a book. I borrowed some money against my Victoria home to purchase a little mid-century cottage on Salt Spring Island, then rented out my pink house and moved across the water. But after a few dark and dreary winter months, boredom and loneliness crept in. I wasn’t writing as much as I’d planned, and I began to feel depressed.

One day, I received a text from a friend of a friend, a recently divorced man living in Vancouver. He invited me on a blind date and, desperate for some reprieve from months of solitude, I arranged a trip to the city to meet him. We clicked right away. He was handsome, charming and funny. And he seemed smitten. We crammed three dates into a single week. I thought it was going well but, when I went back to the city for a fourth date a few months later, he told me he was only interested in being friends, that he didn’t do long-distance romance.

Back on my small island, I obsessed over those four dates. The rejection sent me spiralling into a well of doubt and anxiety about my entire dating history. I wondered whether I’d made bad choices all along, or if there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I imagined myself dying on that small island, alone and forgotten.

Normally, this type of emotional turmoil would send me to meet with an intuitive counsellor. But I didn’t know anyone on the island. So late one night I opened a web browser on my computer and typed “psychic readings—available now” into the search bar. I’m not sure what I was hoping for. Perhaps some kind of divine guidance, or perhaps just someone to talk to. Maybe I wanted some insight into what had gone wrong with my budding romance.

The search yielded dozens of websites—clearing houses that hosted scores of psychic advisers. One site featured as many as 2,000. On these platforms, profiles were stacked in rows, each with a name, image, short biographical description and list of intuitive talents. There were astrologers, numerologists, tarot readers, shamans, fortune tellers, empaths and mediums. The profiles included customer reviews, star ratings and a button that indicated whether the adviser was available, as well as options for ways to connect (e.g. by phone, chat or, in some cases, video). Then came the rates, which ranged widely—from about US$4 to as much as $50 per minute.

I chose a site called Best Psychic Directory, navigated to the “online now” section and scanned the reviews of the available advisers. Eventually, I decided on a psychic in New York City who cost US$5.99 per minute. His reviews claimed he had a high accuracy rate. I purchased US$40 in credit—enough for just six minutes. Then I clicked “connect,” and the phone rang instantly.

I doubted I could make a real connection with someone over the phone, but within minutes the adviser seemed to tune in to me psychically. He asked if I’d recently met a man who’d run hot then cold. I took the bait and divulged that I had. He said the mixed messages came from a powerful soulmate connection—one so strong it scared the guy off. The good news, he assured me, was that the connection was far too strong to resist forever. We’d come together again; we were like magnets. “Don’t contact him,” he told........

© Macleans