Eyes on Me

Nonfiction, Ally Okun

Like so many of our foremothers, I was initiated into the realm of woo at a young age in the form of a tarot deck gifted by my aunt. Then I took Intro to Sociology my first semester of college and became one of those insufferable eighteen-year-olds who love to point out that everything – and I mean everything – is a social construct. This notion, which I had never considered before, was delightfully freeing. If perception is reality and reality is constructed, what was to stop me from being a witch? All this to say that when senior year rolled around and my roommate Edie sent me an ad for an “Elixir Pop-up Bar” at a place called Temple Medicine Healing, I eagerly agreed to go. In addition to serving mystical healing elixirs, this event would apparently feature various types of psychic readings. For a long time, I was interested only in the physical world, that which I could see before me, which I could be certain existed. But as the uncertainties of growing older mounted, I dipped my toe into the spiritual.

*

Our friend Brianna drives us there. Temple Medicine Healing, a name vague enough that it makes you wonder exactly what type of healing goes on there, is in a neighborhood we don’t often frequent. We circle the block a few times, scanning the buildings for one that resembles a temple or a place of healing. Brianna finds a parking lot to pull into, and we approach what looks like an ordinary blue house. Through the front door, we find a room mostly devoid of furniture, except for a table with three women behind it. Laid out atop the white tablecloth are menus, cocktail glasses, and ingredients for strange potions. In the back of the room there’s an altar with twin candles burning, an amethyst bigger than my fist, a bundle of dried leaves with singed edges, and a pillow on the floor to kneel on. A couple of other people mill around the room, none of whom appear to be cis men, making me feel that this is a safe space. I go to use the bathroom and find that the sink is filled with smaller crystals, different varieties of quartz and amethyst.

There are three elixirs being served tonight. The menu features descriptions of the ingredients and the mystical purposes they serve. Brianna, Edie, and I each order a different drink so that we can try them all. Mine has lemon juice, simple syrup, sparkling water, rosemary, and thyme. It’s supposed to help draw out my divine feminine energy...or something like that. I mainly choose it because it sounds the tastiest. 

After we each receive our elixirs, we follow a sign pointing the way to the psychic readings, the part of the night that intrigues me the most. Up a narrow, steep flight of stairs, we make our way into the attic, also devoid of furniture except for three small folding tables. Each table seats a woman reading the futures of other women. According to the sign-up sheet on a clipboard at the top of the stairs, there’s a tarot reader, a psychic witch, and an astrologer. I want to meet with all three, hear what they have to tell me, but since the tarot reading is the cheapest service, that’s what the three of us sign up for. We wander back downstairs to sip our elixirs, and one by one, Ann, the tarot reader, calls us upstairs for our readings. I go last. I sit downstairs nursing my elixir, getting a noseful of herbs with each sip. As Edie and then Brianna return from their readings, they both express delight in how it went.

“Everything she said was so spot-on,” Edie says with her hand on her chest and tears in her eyes. She never has trouble displaying emotion.

*

I, on the other hand, have always had trouble displaying emotions. It’s not that I don’t have feelings. Some people have told me that I have too many. I simply find them too difficult to talk about, to name. One morning, I woke up in my dorm room with the sense that my body could not possibly contain the swirl of pain and self-hatred and fear within it, so that inevitably I would combust. I couldn’t possibly go to class feeling this way, but I also couldn’t stay in bed. I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted the feeling to go away. So I decided to take advantage of my school’s walk-in counseling services.

After sitting in the waiting room of the counseling office for a few minutes, I was called into a small room with a straight-faced, brown-haired woman. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked. 

It was a simple question, but I was speechless. I didn’t know how to put into words what was wrong. In fact, there wasn’t really anything wrong. Nothing in particular had happened to provoke the sensation that my body would turn itself inside out at any given moment. My usual method of dealing with difficult feelings was to shut down and close myself off, to avoid the risk of being told that I was hysterical or crazy or overreacting. Because of this practice, I simply didn’t have the vocabulary to tell the counselor what was wrong.

“I don’t know,” I stammered. I wanted her to ask me different questions. Something more specific than just, “What’s wrong?” Something that might elicit more information out of me, somehow. After all, isn’t that a counselor’s job? Instead, she grew visibly frustrated with me. 

“Well, I can’t help you if you don’t know what’s wrong,” she snapped. It was clear she felt that I was wasting her time. I went to the counseling office as a cry for help, except I didn’t know how to express exactly what it was I needed help with. I left the office feeling worse than before, and even more committed to my policy of silence.

*

Finally, my turn arrives for the tarot reading. I abandon my empty glass and climb the stairs once more. Ann is sitting at the table at the back of the room. I approach and take a seat. On top of the little folding table, Ann has placed a lacy white tablecloth, a burning candle, and a pile of crystals of all different colors. She looks almost stereotypically spiritual. Her long gray-brown hair is held in place with a blue headband that circles the crown of her head. She wears a flowing, robe-like garment over her clothes. Her eyelids are smudged with a silvery-blue shadow. 

We exchange pleasantries as I take a seat, and Ann begins the reading by having me shuffle the tarot deck as many times as I feel necessary. As I shuffle, I try to maintain focus on imparting my energy in the deck rather than eavesdropping on the psychic reading going on next to us. 

“Pay extra attention to any signs of spring that you see,” the blonde psychic witch instructs her client.

I place the deck back on the table. Ann cuts it in half and asks me to choose one part of the deck. I point to the half on my right, and she flips over the top three cards - my past, present, and future.

“The first card is the knight of cups,” Ann explains. The knight, sitting on top of a white horse and holding a silver goblet, winks up at me. “You’ve done a lot of difficult emotional work in the past, working through and letting go of trauma, especially relating to love or romantic relationships. Make sure to honor that work and continue to do it.”

As she speaks, I sit there with a small smile on my face and tears in my eyes. Maybe it’s all bullshit and Ann just speaks in terms general enough to apply to nearly anyone. But it doesn’t feel that way. I feel like she is seeing something in me that’s difficult for me to acknowledge, even to myself. I think of all the times I’ve been hurt. Lying, cheating, leaving – my experiences are nothing unique, but they are uniquely painful to me. I think of how, despite my vows to harden my heart, I remain soft and ready to love again. I never thought of that as a kind of work, but now a perfect stranger is telling me to honor it. I’ve often believed I was weak for handing other people the power to hurt me. But Ann doesn’t see it in that light. She sees it as strength.  

*

When I was fifteen, my grandma asked me on a date. Well, she didn’t really ask me, as I didn’t have a choice in the matter. We were going to have dinner and a movie, the reason being that she wanted “to get to know me better.” I was nervous because I had seen how “getting to know each other” had gone for my older sister. When my sister was sixteen, she and Grandma went on a Caribbean cruise that ended in the ruination of their relationship for at least the next few years. I never learned the details of how it all went so wrong, but it didn't inspire excitement in me at the premise of one-on-one time with our grandmother. 

The movie we saw was The Kids Are Alright. It’s about a lesbian couple. One of them, Julianne Moore, cheats on the other with Mark Ruffalo. That scene was weird for two reasons. The first is that Grandma liked to say how much Mark Ruffalo looked like my dad. The second is that when the rather explicit sex scene began, Grandma turned to me and whispered, “Avert your eyes.” If you’re planning a movie date with your grandma, I recommend vetting for sex scenes first. 

After the movie, we went to get ice cream. As we were waiting in lin,e Grandma said, “So, tell me five adjectives to describe yourself.”

“Um…” I fell silent. What the fuck kind of question is that? Who walks around prepared to pluck adjectives out of the air with which to describe themselves? I don’t know if I was able to come up with a single one. I had the feeling that human beings are too complex to boil down to a few words. Later, I supposed I should have given her adjectives like stupid, lazy, and smelly. Someho,w I didn’t think she would get my sense of humor. But if she wanted me to hype myself up, throw some positive adjectives at her, I wasn’t ready for that. So I hemmed and hawed until we moved on to another topic of conversation.

As time passed and my grandma and I continued to not know each other very well, her question lingered in my mind. To answer such a question would require a modicum of self-examination, something I strived to avoid at all costs. To reflect on myself would require facing the bad along with the good. Did Grandma really want to know about my struggles with depression? Or the time in gym class, I was so angry at my friend that I threw a basketball at her head? Somehow I didn’t think so, and I didn’t want these facts of my life to surface even in my own consciousness. I began a years-long endeavor to repress, repress, repress. No looking inward, and most importantly, no sharing with others anything too deep. I considered it both a matter of self-protection and a favor to everyone around me. Who would want to see these parts of me? And if anyone did see them, who would still want to stick around?

*

“The second card is the five of swords,” Ann goes on. On the card, a figure holds one sword while four more lie crisscrossed on the ground. “Right now, you’re doing a lot of mental work and focusing more on the mental realm than the physical. You’re at a transitioning point where you can see both beginnings and endings, and you have the ability to choose which way you want to go. You should focus on taking care of your physical body to support the mental work you’re doing.”

It’s almost like she knows I’m about to graduate college and making decisions about the direction of my life, what feels like every day. 

The final card, the four of cups, represents my future. “Soon you’ll be able to figure out the best way for you to receive love in all forms,” Ann explains, but I can barely focus on her words because I’m still thinking about the first two cards. 

“I’m going to give you some cedar to smudge to help you release the fear of doing that emotional work,” Ann says, pulling a sandwich bag of dried herb bundles out of her pocket. I accept it eagerly. Letting go of fear is something I could use some help with.

*

One summer evening, my boyfriend at the time, a man with a blue mohawk whose life I knew little about, took me to a bar on the east side. There we met his co-worker, a man named Luca. He stood outside the bar smoking a spliff and offered it to me when we approached. I hated tobacco, but through my college career had never once rejected an offer of free cannabis, so I took a hit. We stood outside finishing the spliff while the two men chatted. I learned that Luca was thirty-three years old and that he had been with his girlfriend for almost a year, which was his longest relationship.

“This is my longest relationship, too,” my boyfriend said, about us. That was news to me. We had only progressed from casual fucking to dating a couple months prior.  

Finally, the spliff burned itself out and we went inside the bar, only to go back outside to the patio. In honor of it being Tuesday, the bar was serving two-dollar Tecates. Once we all had lagers securely in hand, Luca asked if he could read my birth chart. I was intrigued. I didn’t know much about astrology except that Edie kept sending me Instagram memes about being a Virgo. I gave him my date, time, and place of birth as he typed the information into an app on his phone. 

A chart popped up on the screen, resembling an esoteric pie chart dotted with symbols, and he began to translate for me. “You’ve often had your feelings invalidated,” Luca said. “Perhaps by someone you trusted, which caused you to shut down.” 

I thought about the time I confided in a relative that I was having suicidal thoughts, and they responded by telling me I was choosing to be sad on purpose, and all I had to do was choose to be happy. How it made me feel idiotic for trying to be honest about my feelings, and that I’d be better off presenting a falsified, more palatable version of myself. I had just met Luca, but I felt like he knew more about me than my boyfriend sitting next to me. The most impressive part was that Luca didn’t even have to read the paragraphs of description beneath the chart, detailing the placements of the planets when I was born. Just by looking at the chart itself, incomprehensible to me in that moment, he noticed things about me that I had gone through a great deal of effort to hide. 

As Luca continued to go into detail about aspects of my life and personality, my boyfriend dismissed it all as horseshit. “He’s just saying stuff that could be true for anyone,” he said. Maybe so, but then why did I feel so seen? Later that week, I went to the library and checked out a book about astrology. The more I read, the more open I felt. All of a sudden I had access to a tool that made looking inward a little less painful. I could read about a certain sign or planet, recognize myself in it, and finally have the language to communicate about parts of myself I usually tried to suppress. Edie and I spent hours passing the book back and forth, reading about each other’s placements and exclaiming about the accuracy of it all. 

*

I thank Ann and take the cedar smudge stick back downstairs to where Edie and Brianna are waiting for me. I relate the details of my reading to them.

“Wow, that sounds really relevant to you,” Edie says. “Especially the part about the emotional work you’ve done.” Brianna nods in agreement. I’m a bit surprised. Even though they’re my best friends, I try to hide my less pleasant emotions from them, just like I do with everyone. But I guess they see through my facade to how sensitive I really am. 

As we leave Temple Medicine Healing, I keep thinking about the words Ann said. I went into the reading expecting to learn about my future, but the part that sticks with me the most is the card representing my past. I don’t like to acknowledge my pain, even to myself. Sometimes I think that if I don’t speak about it or write about it then it will cease to exist. I don’t want a record of my hurt existing in the universe, a reminder of how fragile my emotions are and how weak that makes me feel. I never want these parts of me to be seen by others, for fear that all the feelings will be too much and they’ll leave. It’s not an unfounded fear, because it’s happened before. But the tarot reading and my friends’ reactions to it have shown me that, try as I might, there are people who see me for who I am behind the blank, unfeeling wall and still want some part in it. 

*

In the months before the tarot reading, a wintery depression came to visit, as it often does, and I retreated to my bed. Going to class gave structure to my day, and homework gave me a distraction from the static inside of my head. But in order to even have the energy to do that I had to shut out everything else. I stayed in my room where no one could see me, because even the thought of someone else’s eyes on me felt like too much to bear. 

Weeks passed. Edie started a new job that she was excited about. She was my best friend and we told each other nearly everything, but this time I couldn’t bring myself to ask her a single question about the job or her life in general. Because if I asked her about her life, she might ask me about mine and there was nothing I wanted to talk about less. What was there to say? That I didn’t feel worthy of anything, really, and that’s why I passed the hours of the day numbing myself with reality television, avoiding human interaction at all costs? Or that I couldn’t stand to hear about her new job right now because hearing how well she was doing would remind me of how unwell I was? I didn’t want to say that to her, so I said nothing at all.

Until one day, when I was in my room and Edie was in hers and she sent me a text that read, “Do you feel like it’s been hard for us to be friends lately?” I wanted to cry when I read it, but all the effort I put into suppressing my emotions left me dry. This was it, I thought. I was certain she was going to say she didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. Other people had jumped ship on me before, so why should she be any different? 

I struggled with what to say in response. I didn’t know how to put what I was going through into words. That’s the thing about depression. It renders almost everything unintelligible. Eventually, I typed out a message about how closing myself off and pushing her away was about me and not her and hit send. I dreaded the response. When it came, all it said was, “Come to the living room.”

I joined her on the couch, fully prepared not to say another word about myself or how I was feeling because that’s what I’d always done. But Edie wouldn’t stand for that. She asked me question after question. Not only that, but she asked all the right questions. Unlike the counselor on campus, she persisted, probing about different areas of my life. 

“Is there anything going on with your family?” she asked.

No, it wasn’t quite that. “I guess I’ve just...found it hard to be around people lately,” I stammered.

“Yeah, well, people have been shitty to you lately,” she observed. The man with the blue mohawk had dumped me over text a couple months ago. I hadn’t talked about it a whole lot because I didn’t even like him that much, and I didn’t want to admit that he had the power to hurt me, but hearing someone acknowledge aloud the shittiness of the situation was validating. Some things objectively sucked, and being affected by them wasn’t a weakness.  

We kept talking, and I found myself able to string together halting, uncertain words, but words nonetheless, that conveyed the fogginess inside my head and the dead weight in my chest. As we talked, I realized there was someone who wanted to see these parts of me, the depression and the anxiety and the low self-esteem, and still be there for me. I realized the cliche that talking about your feelings makes you feel better has some truth to it. And I realized that being seen didn’t have to be as scary as I had built it up to be in my head. 

*

We leave Temple Medicine Healing, and Brianna drops Edie and me off at our apartment. I go into my room, sit down on my bed, and take a lighter to the end of the smudge stick. As I watch the tiny tendril of smoke rising from it, inhaling the earthy scent, I think about fear. I’ve never been good at visualizing, but I try to picture my fear of opening up, of letting others see all the good and the bad within me, of acknowledging that all of this doesn’t make me weak but simply human, burning away with the cedar. I think about the four of cups representing my future, how Ann said I will be able to figure out the best ways to receive love. It’s going to take hard work to become comfortable with making myself known, but at least I’ve set foot down the path. As the cedar burns down to my fingertips, I drop what’s left into a candlestick on my windowsill. I look through the window at the world outside, vowing to step into it as I am.

---

Ally Okun is a writer of nonfiction and fiction, exploring the gray area between the two. Her essays have been published in Wishbone Words, TrashLight Press, and The Broken Teacup. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and their spoiled tuxedo cat. Find her online @ally.okun.