My last summer in New York...
I was a 1-800-psychic.
It was summer in Manhattan and outside felt like a giant mouth – humid and stale. I was 26 years old, unemployed and starving, and so naturally that’s how I found myself trying to get a job as a psychic for a 1-800-psychic hotline.
“I sense…California…,” I said into the phone, chewing my lip, with a far-off look in my eye that could either be mistaken for connecting to the cosmic void, or being very constipated. “I get an impression of Hollywood. Maybe trying to make a go of it in the movies?” On the other end of the line was Derek, the first representative from a psychic company designated to test me. For this particular company, one’s psychic-ness was measured by two live test readings, which would determine whether the network took you on or not as a full-fledged psychic. In front of me was every method of divination imaginable: tarot cards, crystals, a pendulum, and even a deck of coffee-stained playing cards.
“Wow. You’re right,” Derek said to me after a pause. “My girlfriend’s in L.A., and I’ve been thinking about going out there and taking a screenwriting course.”
I couldn’t help but smile. My hit on California hadn’t even come from my extensive occult stash; it was actually a gut instinct, and I decided to go with it. My accurate read on Derek felt inspiring– a feeling I hadn’t experienced in a very long time and suddenly I felt a twinge of optimism, another foreign feeling.
“I have to say, I’m really impressed with your gift,” Derek said. “I’m going to pass you on to the next phase of the onboarding process. My colleague will be in touch with you shortly.”
As I hung up, I couldn’t help but think of a brand new future for myself as a well-renowned psychic. I imagined guest stints on TV talk shows, befriending Oprah, a book tour, my own collectible mug and T-shirt. I bet Derek was already getting ready to load up his hatchback with a half-written script on his laptop right this minute, thanking his lucky stars he met me. It was a misguided if not clearly delusional fantasy but I needed to think I was good at something. I took it as the sign I needed.
Becoming a 1-800-hotline psychic wasn’t what I had in mind as a teenager who spent many hours at the local occult store, perusing books on astrology, numerology, and tarot, let alone the young woman who moved to New York City with stars in her eyes. But it wasn’t a total shock about how on the money I was about Derek and his Hollywood aspirations. I’ve always been fairly intuitive; I have a knack for picking up on other people’s energy and knowing certain things were just going to happen.
Case in point: New York. I felt so instinctively drawn to the city that when it came to applying to colleges during my senior year in high school, I only applied to one – NYU. Despite questions of, “Shouldn’t you apply to another school?” and “What if it doesn’t work out?” I remained steadfast in my belief that New York was my destiny. The stars seemingly aligned when my stubbornness (and unwarranted confidence as a seventeen year old) turned out to be right and I was accepted into NYU. It made sense according to the very best of all of my fortune predictions that I played with my friends as a teen, which told me I was destined to become an Oscar-winning actress, live in NYC, marry a tall, dark-haired man and pop out three kids: two girls and a boy.
Now that I was living in the city of my dreams and because I never found blonds or redheads remotely attractive, I figured my earlier predictions didn’t seem unreasonable or outlandish; they seemed downright doable. But, with the exception of me living in NYC, none of those things happened. The future I thought I was destined to have seemed like a bunch of hooey and now I was desperate. My friends from NYU and those back home in Toronto all seemed to be doing “stuff”; the kind of stuff that social media feeds are made for. “We’re engaged! And incredibly happy!” “Just got a promotion at my incredible workplace!” “Bought my first condo and this view of the Brooklyn Bridge is so incredible!”
My "stuff" involved being incredibly single, incredibly broke, and avoiding my mother’s incredibly annoying “I think you should come home now” phone calls. It was the mid-aughts and I was living at one of those “recession special” apartments with two other roommates and a generational family of mice who were slowly but surely dying out thanks to the traps we begrudgingly set in the kitchen each night. Upon signing the lease, I thought getting the apartment was a sign. After all, I was living kitty corner to NYU, my dream school. Wasn’t this a full circle moment? Wasn’t this a sign that the Universe was setting things up perfectly for me? I needed it to believe it since I was feeling as stuck as the mice I found in the traps each morning.
I’d recently finished acting school at Lee Strasberg, but was quickly realizing studying acting was really just an expensive way to becoming a full-time waitress. Only four years prior I’d graduated from NYU with a B.A. in Dramatic Literature, Cinema Studies, and Theatre History. I didn’t know what to do with that degree either, which is also why I became a waitress. But I hated waitressing, which explains why I had been fired from three restaurant jobs in three months, including a job as a cashier at a “gourmet” hot dog shop on Macdougal Street that was not at all ironic. I spent most of the time either unsuccessfully upselling blueberry jam on a hot dog as a “must-try delicacy” or devouring so many veggie dogs, which served as my only meal for most days, it’s a mystery I didn’t have diabetes. I was also forced to wear the worst uniform in my service industry career: an oversized red trucker hat matched with a bright mustard yellow t-shirt that was emblazoned with a giant angry weiner wearing a cape.
Yes, a super weiner. I was mortified every time I left my apartment wearing it. Given the atrocious attire and my surely sky-high sodium levels, I knew being fired from the hot dog job was surely a blessing for both my ego and my blood pressure, but my meager bank account was taking a hit. My only saving grace was my part-time gig walking a persnickety dog for a gay couple in Chelsea. His name was Baxter and he also happened to be a weiner dog. It was the most phallic summer of my life and I wasn’t even getting laid. Others might call that a sign too. I call it depression.
As a Canadian I knew my job options in New York were limited but I didn’t want to go home. Going home felt like failure, and I didn’t want the burden of returning home with my tail between my legs to add to the feeling of uselessness I already lived and breathed. Making it in New York as an actress had been my goal since I was thirteen years old; it was the barometer of which I placed my self-worth and value, so much so that I was attempting to work as a psychic as my latest vain attempt to become one of the city’s success stories, still clinging onto the hope it once gave me as a young wide-eyed girl who watched movies and Must-See TV Thursdays with sweeping views of the Empire State Building and Central Park, and said to myself, “That’s where I want to live.” It was the place where I thought I would be something incredible and I didn’t feel good about anything I was doing. Which is why that summer I unearthed my deck of tarot cards from my trunk for the first time in months because I needed a sign about what to do with my life. From high school and beyond, I had brought my tarot cards with me, and whenever there was a question my friends and I needed clarity on, I consulted the deck.
“What does John think about me?”
“Let’s ask the cards.”
“Will I get the job at the gallery?”
“Lemme throw down some cards and have a look-see.”
“Am I pregnant?”
“I’ll do a card reading and let you know!”
I shuffled the deck and prayed I would be given a sign – the sign that would reassure me that my destiny, despite its dreary appearances, was still intact. Instead I pulled the Tower and Ten of Swords, which basically means some serious shit is going to hit the fan. Immediately my heart sank. I had a feeling the cards were telling me it was all over: the acting dream, the New York dream, my dream husband, everything. I was doomed to failure. Before I spiraled further I quickly called a friend who was familiar with tarot and occult-y things for comfort and advice. She was the one who suggested that I do readings for money.
“You mean, like, become a psychic?”
“Sure,” she said. “You’re intuitive enough. You can just do it on the Internet.”
I shrugged and thought, “What the heck?” I was broke and desperate, and she made it sound so easy, like taking candy from a baby but way more lucrative and less controversial. It couldn’t be any worse than wearing a large hot dog on my chest. Within minutes, I found a number of sites that were looking for psychics, and credentials weren’t even required for many of them. Cha-ching! Soon I made an appointment for testing and a few days later Derek called.
Derek.
The irony wasn’t lost on me – here I was predicting the life of Derek (if that was even his real name), who was maybe a future Oscar-winning screenwriter, or at least a future screenwriter who procrastinates for a living in a coffee shop, and I couldn’t even properly intuit my own next step in life. If anything I was supposed to be the screenwriter procrastinating for a living in a coffee shop.
Like acting, writing was something I loved since childhood, but I had mostly put it on the back-burner to pursue the Oscar-winning actress future I had desired for myself so many years ago. As a child I would spend hours and hours writing stories on my mom’s typewriter, and when our family graduated to a Compaq Presario in the ‘90s, as a teenager, I’d spend Saturday nights writing scripts based on “The X-Files” (I had a big crush on David Duchovny who was my father’s age and probably said a lot about my future dating patterns). In some ways, writing had always been whispering to me, nagging me to pay attention to it as I took various creative writing workshops throughout the years. But my acting dream was louder; like the audacious captain of the football team, it was flashy and exciting, and I was drunk on its loose promise of getting lucky. Of course, if my career trajectory were a rom-com, my writing was like the dorky best friend; the quiet and smart one with whom you share a natural and easy shorthand even if you haven’t talked in a while. The one who everyone else is rooting for while muttering under their breath, “Why on earth is she chasing after that other moron?” It’s always the silent, understated gifts of ours that go unnoticed. The thing is, writing also felt exciting to me, but not in the way acting felt; instead of feeling anxiety-riddled, it strangely felt empowering (strange because I wasn’t used to feeling in control of my life at that time) and I wanted to explore it.
Just like my prediction for Derek, I had a feeling that “something” was telling me to continue on with writing. But I didn’t know how to put the pieces together. I had tried the year before, writing an off-off-off-off-off Broadway play that I produced, co-starred, and co-directed in a dusty black box theater in Greenwich Village. The play was called “Bad Fish” and it was about murder, horny teenagers and cocaine, which was a rather dark and surprising story to write considering I was a virgin until the age of 22 and once asked, “Who’s Molly?” upon hearing that’s what people were doing during raves.
And, of course, the murder part – if you don’t count the time I accidentally murdered a family of bunnies with a weedwacker during my parks & rec job as a college student (if it makes you feel any better, the nightmares still haunt me and I’ve been a vegetarian for over a decade).
Writing the play had been born out of necessity and sheer creative delight, and good old fashioned gumption. As an acting student, the depressing discovery that much of my life as a performer would hinge on someone else hiring me and telling me what to do didn’t sit well with my intrepid Capricorn self. I wanted to create when I wanted to create, and more importantly, I wanted to create what I wanted to create. I didn’t want to serve tables indefinitely, waiting for the magical “call” that would change my life.
At the same time I had read about the careers of Mindy Kaling and Elizabeth Meriwether, successful TV writers who had made their start as aspiring playwrights in New York. Creating my own stuff seemed like the avenue I wanted to try, and since my work was being highly praised in my playwriting class at the time, I thought I had a decent shot. The writing bug inspired me so much I co-wrote a second play a few months later, which was produced in a local theater festival. But not a lot of people watched or even cared about my plays. As it turned out, I wasn’t the next Mindy Kaling or Elizabeth Meriwether. The mediocre reviews and lackluster audience attendance were enough for me to second guess myself. Like Derek (well, prior to our life-changing call), I had doubts about my future as a writer. Could I make it as a playwright? What else would I write about? Was I even a good writer?
All I really knew was that I wanted to stay in New York and had a student loan to pay for, so becoming a 1-800-hotline-psychic not only seemed like a credible way to pay the bills without smelling like a hot dog, but was also something that felt, dare I say, incredible?
Then Nancy, the site’s other rep, and Derek’s colleague, called to test me the next day.
“Uh, nope,” she said to me within minutes of our call, after I’d just told her that I didn’t think Bill was ever going to propose to “Nan”.
“Nope?”
“Yeah, no. I don’t think you have it.”
“It?”
“The quality. The ability. You’re not it,” she said.
“Well, nothing’s a hundred percent in life—“
“Our psychics are,” she huffed. “Sorry, but we don’t think you’re a good fit.” She promptly hung up. I was pretty sure Nancy’s slight was personal; it was obvious that she was the “Nan” in question. Was it my problem that Bill felt cagey? Clearly if you have to ask a psychic whether your boyfriend is going to propose, then the answer is probably not the one you want.
Undeterred, I searched for other psychic sites online. I needed to prove Nancy wrong. I needed to prove the entire West Village wrong. I needed to prove the fucking fates wrong that I wasn’t destined for a life of disappointment and failure. So I quickly found a website so sure of itself that no evaluation was required. Psychics were simply asked to create an account online and do their own marketing. That didn’t seem too hard. I quickly set up my account and came up with snappy headlines (“A rising psychic in New York City who will tell you like it is”) and details about my gift (“‘Wow!’ says psychic expert Derek”), and for the first time in a long time I felt excited and hopeful about something. Within 24 hours of setting up my psychic account, I already booked my first appointment with my very first client: Wanda, a middle-aged woman who lived in the Midwest. Our appointment was set for 2 p.m. later that week. I couldn’t help but take it as a sign that maybe this psychic business was going to pay off, and maybe this had been in the cards all along. I was so elated that I even told Baxter all about it as I picked him up and carried him downstairs for his afternoon poop.
Around this time I said yes to having drinks with some of my old friends from NYU. Saying yes to drinks was something I couldn’t afford financially or emotionally but there I was being picked up in a Porsche Cayenne driven by a friend of a friend who worked in finance and wore a suit tailored so snugly to his person like an amniotic sac, I had no doubt he was born wearing it. They pretty much all worked in finance and lived in incredible apartments with incredible views and wore incredible clothing that cost more than my rent. I wore a respectable-looking top and shorts from Forever 21, a misnomer if there ever was one, and allotted $40 for the night from my very tight budget, which was laughable in New York City even during a down economy. I knew “having drinks” meant multiple stops, multiple places to tip, multiple places to awkwardly count my cash, all one-dollar bills (leftover tip money from the blueberry stains, sweat, and tears I earned at the hot dog counter) against their black AMEX cards.
Thankfully, my companions were extremely generous, so when it came to paying the bill for the platters of oysters and other fancy fried things they ordered at the Blue Ribbon, our first stop of the evening, they eagerly took care of it. I had about $20 to my name when we landed at the last stop of the night, one of those “secret” speakeasies that require an obnoxious password like “Hemingway” to enter. The bar was apothecary-themed and libations were served in kitschy containers like beakers and were naturally exorbitantly priced, which meant my $20 could pay for exactly one drink with an embarrassing tip. At this point in the evening, our conversation bandwidth had exceeded small talk and NYU nostalgia, which made me nervous since I knew I would have to talk about myself and I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t done anything incredible in my life. We all had graduated from the same school, in the same year, yet I was most likely the only one who was earning a living carrying a 30 pound dachshund up and down four flights of stairs because his stubby legs couldn’t reach the steps. I couldn’t speak about my new foray into fortune-telling. Not now. Not until I made my appearance on Oprah, or at least spoke with Wanda the next day. So when one of the guys (not Porsche Cayenne) asked me what was new, I told him about my plays.
“You write plays? That’s so cool.” His sincerity was surprising. “I wish I could do something like that.” His wistful response confused me since it was coming from one of the smartest people I knew. He’d been working on Wall Street since graduation, and was currently living in the Financial District in a luxe apartment that probably housed only the really rich mice. Seemingly he had it all. Did he not hear me talk about the humid and dank theater in which me and the cast lugged heavy props and costumes until we shed our weight in sweat? Or the time when the special effects make-up for the murder victim’s stabbing wound wasn’t coalescing properly, which freaked us out since without it, the climax of the play wouldn’t make a lick of sense? Or when I had to recast one of my moody male leads at the last minute? I was sure it all sounded like child’s play compared to his board meetings with his big coked up boss or his highfalutin lunches filled with lobster and champagne ( not that this was at all accurate but only because my reference to Wall Street is very much rooted in its portrayal from the 1980s).
“It sounds fun,” he said. “You’re doing what you love.”
He was right. Writing those plays delighted me in a way I had never experienced before; it was the first time I gave myself permission to control my own creative fate, and whether or not anyone liked or watched them didn’t take away from the fact that the experience felt exhilarating. It felt like I was doing what I was meant to do all along – much more so than acting ever did.
He then paused and looked down at his drink before saying, “Not everyone can say that.”
And that’s when it hit me. The biggest sign of all. At some point in time (if we’re lucky) we realize some of the lies we were fed as children – the Tooth Fairy being a real fairy, roadkill is just an animal “napping”, perceived success equals fulfillment – are simply not true (with the exception that maybe some animals on the side of the road could indeed be very tired). The latter finally dawned on me, on a velveteen chair, sipping an overpriced drink out of a gold-encrusted beaker that I couldn’t afford. Until this moment, I had wrongly assumed that I was less than my peers because I didn’t have what they had on paper – or on social media feeds. They had expense accounts and long job titles that sounded important, while I was wearing dumb uniforms and answering to “excuse me, miss” on a quest to fulfill what I thought were my true heart’s desires, which was currently leading me nowhere close to where I thought I should be at 26. I was disappointed with my life, but what did it matter if maybe we all felt a little empty and confused inside? If we were all chasing these outward markers of success that didn’t truly feel like us? The man across from me had everything he could ever want, but both of us were dissatisfied in our own way. And if I was to be broke and miserable, shouldn’t I be at least trying to do what I really wanted to do?
“Are you writing anything else?” he asked.
“Not right now,” I said, a wave of shame crossing over me. My mind flashed to the horrible restaurant jobs and now my dalliance with giving Nostradamus a run for his money. I knew I wasn't writing because writing was hard and scary. But it couldn’t be scarier than attempting to convince New Yorkers why they should eat a $10 hot dog when they could buy one on the corner for $2 “without that fancy shit on it.” Or convincing yourself that you’re a world-class psychic when you’re just someone who has good instincts sometimes – if she’s brave enough to listen to them.
The next day, right on schedule, my cell phone rang at 2 p.m. sharp, but I didn’t pick it up. I let it ring until Wanda, poor Wanda—who wanted to know how she would find success and happiness and love just like the rest of us—finally hung up, and no doubt connected with another psychic who would no doubt tell her everything she wanted to hear.
This is the thing about psychics. We turn to them, or tarot cards, in hopes of controlling our future in the same way we turn to the last page in the paperback thriller because we want to know the protagonist is safe from the bad guy. We want to know that we will be okay. Growing up, my friends and I spent sleepovers doing anything and everything that could unlock the secrets of what our futures held—tea leaves, dream interpretation, palmistry. We would hold onto the best prediction until the next thing that promised an even better future came along. It was kind of like playing the board game, Life. We would continue spinning the wheel until we landed on what we thought was the right job (a movie star!), the right guy (a rich doctor!) and the right car (a Jeep Cherokee!). Unfortunately, our wheel of fortune stopped spinning when one of my friends learned from the cards that she would stay in our hometown and end up living in her parents’ basement married to a guy named Barry with a Ford Taurus. And while it’s understandable that she was irritated and worried about her fate as a young girl – despite the Taurus being one of the most reliable cars ever made – that didn’t end up being her destiny. The last I heard she traveled extensively within Europe and settled somewhere new with a guy who I don’t think is named Barry (although I secretly hope he is). So while I think we are all intuitive on some level, I don’t think anyone can tell you what your future will be – you get to decide that. Just like how I don’t think your bright future hinges on any one thing or opportunity. You get to decide you will be okay.
Which means when things change, as they inevitably will, and when what we think will happen doesn’t – like winning the Best Actress Oscar and being all types of annoyingly successful before turning 30 –our future becomes the undoing of who we thought we ought to be in our life, and shifts into the unfolding and the claiming as who we are now.
Saying goodbye to my dream of acting in New York was terrifying. It was my identity for so many years. “I am Brianne, and I’m going to be an actress in New York” was my opening line to anyone who listened. It was the hope that got me through as a young girl applying to and then graduating from NYU. It was the hope I clung onto as a twentysomething woman each night as I scrubbed tables and married ketchup bottles at my serving jobs in between getting numerous headshots – so many headshots – done. It was the hope of becoming that successful person after this shitty “in between” stage was over. I was looking for a sign to tell me when that would happen, when I could trust that I was okay, but what I didn’t realize was that exact sign was looking at me square in the face every time I checked my reflection in the mirror.
So then who was I? I was definitely not a psychic – contrary to Derek’s faith in me. No, I knew I was a writer. Maybe I wasn’t incredible at it yet, but I had to try. I had to try without knowing the future of it all. The same feeling I had about moving to New York was now telling me it was time to leave. I’d been holding on too tightly to the dream I had obviously outgrown. I was focusing my attention on quick fixes – like working as a 1-800-hotline psychic – to not only avoid an imminent ending, but also to avoid the risk of starting something new. I’d been plagued with doubt on whether I could trust myself to take a new leap – after all, didn’t my instincts lead me to pursue acting in New York in the first place? If I was so wrong about that, how could I trust myself to know the difference?
But then I asked myself: what if everything in my life, including the dream I had about moving to New York to become an actress, was actually part of my destiny after all? What if it was all leading me to a new beginning that was always part of my fate – if I could just let it happen? If I could trust myself to do it?
I made my decision by the time my mom’s next phone call came – I was going to move back home to Toronto and I was going to write. Afterwards, I took myself on a walk around my neighborhood, taking in the sights and sounds of New York, and basked in the feeling that no matter what happened or didn’t happen according to my plan, I knew it would be okay because I decided it, and that’s the only sign I ever needed.
And scene!
This essay was included in my book proposal that I sent out last fall, and I felt very strongly to share it with you now (I DUNNO IF I AM ALLOWED TO? BUT HERE WE ARE). In full disclosure, this essay wasn’t what I intended to share this week but I strangely — or not so strangely because I believe in woo woo and synchronicities and God’s plan, and, yes, intuition, obvs — I am going through something very, very similar right now in my life. Scarily, eerily similar.
Re-reading it back has been a lesson for me. A lesson to trust myself. My gifts. My gut. I don’t need signs to make a decision because, as one of my mentors says, our whole life is a sign. But if you need a sign to believe that leaving somewhere or someone, is your new shot at happiness, or that you need a sign to believe in that thing — that gorgeous, sparkly thing that you do that makes you feel gorgeous and sparkly inside — is, indeed, your THING, even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone…then, yes, take this essay as your sign. Go. Do. Create. Be.
Thanks for being here!
Love, Brie
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