HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'Exactly what a tarot reader told me.'

This article originally appeared on Holly Wainwright's Substack, Holly Out Loud. Sign up here.

If being 'woo-woo' is considering yourself all-in on everything spiritual and otherworldly, I am somewhere around a singular woo.

I would have been entirely woo-less, a firm non-believer in anything I couldn't see and quantify, until I 'married' into a double-woo family. My late mother-in-law, Julie, was a psychic, something I knew before we met. She did readings for friends, family and friends-of-friends, specialising in something called psychometry, divining information from objects — jewellery, say — that holds energy from its owner.

Watch: Here's what happened when the Mamamia Out Loud hosts sat down with a tarot reader. Post continues below.

The first time I encountered her relationship with the Other Side we were lugging boxes into Julie's new house, the Leichhardt semi she had bought into with Brent's brother and his partner that would be her home until she died. I walked into the lounge room to find Julie standing still in the middle of the wooden floor, staring into the corner.

"My mother's there," she told me, calmly. "She's wearing a hat, and she's judging me."

Yeah. It was like that.

I never did let Julie give me a reading. But over time, I saw how she brought an enormous amount of comfort to people who were often struggling in grief and pain, including friends of mine who had asked to sit with her. It began to seem churlish, cruel almost, to scoff at this. I loved Julie and I liked her a great deal and nothing about her fit ideas I might have been holding about 'charlatans' and 'cheats' who might seek to exploit people looking for answers.

Also, Julie rarely took payment for what she did. A bottle of wine would be welcome to share after the reading, perhaps, sure.

Brent's sister and cousins have similar gifts, and although I have never jumped in with both feet, my woo-denial has had its edges knocked off by experience.

I tell you this to colour some background to the group tarot reading we did on Mamamia Out Loud this week.

Image: Supplied.

Jessie was all-in. She'd sat down with Evelyn The Tarot Reader the last time she was in the Mamamia office (yes, it's the kind of workplace where we have an eyebrow artist once a month, and sometimes a fortune-teller). Evelyn had known things that Jessie was convinced were not just Google-able.

Amelia was all-out. She went along with it, out of curiosity and professional devotion to the Story, but the whole idea made her itchy.

And I was single woo. Open, but not embracing.

You can listen to how it all went on Friday's episode and a subscriber episode next week, but for me, here's the moment I had to stop pretending I was above it all.

Listen: Three Out Loud hosts, one tarot card reader, Evelyn, and our unfiltered reactions. What could go wrong? Post continues below.

When we were alone (well, as alone as you can be when you're being recorded), the first two cards that Evelyn turned for me from the ones I chose were the Devil and The Hanged Man. This was not going well.

The Devil, she said, represented some bad energy, either mine towards others, or others towards me, that needed to be cleared. Jealousy, perhaps?

I wrote this piece about jealousy only the other week, about how it had crippled me at times, but I had conquered it. I believe that's true, but I know it can hang around, dressed up as insecurity, holding on too tightly to things I need to let go. So, hmmm.

"The first card I chose. Things were not looking good." Image: Supplied.

But the Hanged Man?

"You need to cut something out of your diet," Evelyn told me, straight up. And it was like Julie had walked into the room and sat down beside me. This is TMI, friends, and I do apologise, but I've been having a lot of gut problems lately and just three days before this reading I had been for a round of tests to figure out why.

"I don't know what it is," she said. "But it's something you're ingesting, and you need to make a change."

I don't think Evelyn was snooping around in my MyHealth records lately.

Unfortunately for me, the actual tests were inconclusive. So, do I go back to Evelyn, and just yell "Dairy!" "Gluten!" "Coffee!" "Wine!" at cards until they 'fess up? Possibly.

Sign up to Holly Wainwright's Substack here.

Feature Image: Supplied.