An Encounter with an Irish Fortune Teller
By Sunita Singh Hans, Storyteller for RU Student Life
I like to think that everyone has experienced some kind of magic. Whether it’s witnessing a miracle, making someone’s dream come true or finding a deep connection to a song, I like to believe that magic is all around us. Maybe it’s wishful thinking or childlike naivety, but I like to open my mind up to the possibility of something beyond our comprehension that will maybe allow us to look inside of ourselves, and to see the world in a completely different way.
There’s a beach town called Bundoran in Ireland, and it’s the closest thing to magic I have ever known. It’s filled with horse drawn carriages, people that possess the most eclectic Irish charm and the best whipped ice-cream you’ll ever have. It also consists of fairy bridges and a wishing chair, which I visited on my 19th birthday and made a wish to get into Ryerson University.
My acceptance letter arrived the next day.
So maybe it’s coincidence, wishful thinking or childlike naivety. But maybe it’s something else.
The thought of going to a psychic first occurred to me when a few of my friends told me about their own experiences. I never knew what to make of psychics because I had never been to one before, but I have always had a fascination with them ever since I watched Now and Then as a child. After turning 21 I finally decided to go, because for the first time in my life I felt completely uncertain about what my future was going to bring. I knew I wanted to go to someone trustworthy, and some friends in Ireland recommended going to a woman in Bundoran called Teresa. I didn’t expect too many answers. I mostly just went out of curiosity, fun, and for a good story to tell my friends when I returned to Toronto. But I could have never guessed what a life changing experience it would turn out to be.
On the 16th of August — two weeks before I moved back to Toronto — my parents and I went to Bundoran. The familiar fresh coastal air greeted me as I walked throughout the town, reminisced about the wonderful memories I had made there and explored the summer Adventure Park. Right between the Candy Land shack and the Caterpillar rollercoaster ride was a caravan with a sign propped up against it, which read “Gypsy Teresa, the 7th daughter of the 7th daughter”. It seemed a little gimmicky, and I felt myself grow skeptical. I noticed she was currently doing a reading on a man, and when he came out of the caravan I asked him what he thought of her, to which he assured me she was “very, very good”. He seemed almost spooked, and it suddenly made me nervous and unsure. But she charged little and my parents encouraged me, so I swallowed my fears and walked up the caravan steps.
From the outside, the caravan looks completely normal, but as soon as I stepped inside it I felt entirely different. It wasn’t like I was stepping inside a dark foggy room with hanging drapes and crystals everywhere. In fact, there was hardly any psychic paraphernalia at all. When I pictured seeing a psychic, I imagined dim lighting and a bunch of candles with a woman that was wearing some kind of a cloak and drenched in jewels. Maybe even a black cat in the corner. But here was a relatively normal looking caravan if not a bit cramped and cluttered, with an ordinary kitchen and a table booth. For some reason this was more unsettling for me because it made it seem more real. As for Teresa, when I walked in she was she was standing at the sink doing dishes in jeans and a plain white t-shirt.
She gestures for me to sit down as soon as I say hello, and then I notice one of the only indications that this stranger is actually a psychic. Propped up on the table booth are laminated news articles, and I wonder if they chronicle some kind of investigation she helped predict. I’m just about to ask when she slides in across from me and I’m distracted by the crystal ball she places on the table.
“Place your hands on either side and close your eyes,” She says, “think about something you want and make a wish.” As I do this she goes back to her dishes. She then sits back down, gives me a blessing and proceeds to tell me about the guardian angel I have, the many friends who speak of me so highly and the bright future that awaits me. She keeps her eyes on the crystal and tells me about the boy I’ll meet in 6 months, the blue car in my future and the property that will be hugely significant in my life. Along with this she tells me some more personal details about what awaits me, but I’m skeptical about everything she’s said so far because only time can really tell if any of it is true.
Then she looks right at me. Her eyes are so striking that I feel she can see right inside me, into my soul.
“You hold yourself back,” She tells me. “You have no confidence in yourself.”
This is when my heart starts pounding. She knows exactly how I act in social situations, that I hide from new people because I’m afraid of not being accepted, and she tells me I brighten a room when I walk into it but I force myself to stand in instead of standing out. She knows exactly how my mind works, how I overthink and fill myself with regret, and she can tell exactly what my family mean to me and how much I love my home despite choosing to study abroad. She has the most serious expression on her face when she tells me that I’m conflicted between two places, that I’m holding myself back too much in life and — this is the one that really gets to me —
“You are your own worst enemy.”
Two important things to know about me to know before I continue. One, anxiety has been a huge part of my life since I was a little girl, and it has only been in the past two years that I have learned how to overcome it. Two, ever since starting university I’ve learned that I’m an introvert. I love being around people and I have an amazing group of friends, but socializing drains me from energy and my favourite place is hiding in fictional worlds. I’m incredibly hard on myself about these two things. I push myself to be different and to be more like the people I look up to, which is why I was so emotionally affected by what Teresa tells me next.
“You’re constantly looking at what’s behind you or ahead of you,” Teresa tells me “And because of this you always feel unsatisfied.”
This strikes something inside of me and I start to tear up, because these are things I’ve always known about myself but that I’ve never been able to face until now. Maybe Teresa really isn’t psychic and everything she said about my future were just made up guesses. But she definitely has a skill for reading personalities, and when she analyses me it’s almost like I’m looking at myself from somebody else’s perception and seeing everything that’s wrong.
There was a time in my life when moving to Canada was my biggest dream, and now that I’m here all I can think about is what’s next, and this goes for a lot of university students. As soon as we begin university we’re forced to think our careers and the rest of our lives. But do we ever just take a minute to look around and think about how we made it this far? We all have dreams and goals, but at one point Ryerson University was our dream. This was our goal. And we made that happen. Anytime I think about the future now and it gives me anxiety, I now instead replay in my mind the moment I opened my acceptance letter to Ryerson and I think about how uncertainty can lead to incredible things.
The thing about being in your twenties is that for the first time in your life, you don’t know what’s coming next. When we’re in elementary school we have middle school ahead of us, and then high school and post-secondary. I’ve never really thought past university because I don’t like not knowing. I don’t like not knowing why I’m built as an introvert, or someone who has anxiety, or what the next few years of my life will be. What I learned from Teresa is that I’ve let so many of these questions flood my mind that it’s preventing me from being in the moment.
Teresa gave me the insightful details about my future that I was looking for. She said countless things about how amazing my future will be, but what I realized is that even if all those wonderful occurrences come true I don’t want them to happen right now. Out of everything she said, the best thing Teresa told me was to stop looking for answers. The last thing she said to me before I left her, were three simple words:
“Enjoy right now.”
It’s been a few months since my trip to Bundoran and I’ve made more of an effort to stop holding myself back, to stop overthinking every little thing, and most of all to be in my present. It’s made me a happier person, more focused, and allowed my mind for more creative pursuits when it’s not weighed down with worry.
We are young, free and limitless, caught between being adults and still feeling like kids. This often leaves us in angst and searching for answers in crystal balls, when the answers have been inside of us all along. Maybe the magic is not in being able to predict what is going to happen to us next. Maybe it’s about being in the freedom of uncertainty and finding the magic there.
