What it takes to find God

He's hiding in the lipsticks.

I’m on the phone to my mother. I’m standing in Boots. “Did I tell you I went to see a psychic?”

I went to see a psychic in January. She got everything wrong about me. She confidently said that I am a student (I am nearly twenty-nine, with something of a world-famous chip on my shoulder about not having a degree). I take the compliment. That’s what you get for never smoking. Still, bad start. It got worse.

First week of January fortune-telling classic. “You have just returned from a holiday… very restful.” Wrong again, but nice try. Holiday? Yes. Restful? No. Emergency therapy session? Yes. I’m nodding earnestly, I can feel my eyes are too wide, which they get when I am masking badly. I don’t think she’s noticing.

I don’t really know why I’m sitting here, in the back room of a small bright purple magic shop in Finsbury Park. All manner of potion brewing around us as we huddle around the small fold-out table. She’s using tarot cards and, clearly, a rather patchy connection to the spirit guides. She shuffles them convincingly and instructs me to make small piles, but only by using my left hand. Why is this hard? I want her to tell me I’m good at this. Revealing.

“You are considering a change in career,” she pronounces. I’m not sure you could call what is happening to me a career. I am sure, however, that I have almost no hopes for anything but more of the same. She’s dispensing what she describes as a “General Reading,” after which we can get into more specific questions. I tell her I’m an artist. It seems to land more convincingly than usual, maybe I have winced less than usual. She bats back that she can see that I will never have any money of my own, only through marriage.

My questions are vague and desperate. I feel desperate. What is going to happen to me? Neither of us know, one of us is pretending to know. She elucidates with agonisingly scant detail, the imminent arrival of some romantic partner. She delivers this carefully. She is looking at me, at my haircut, very carefully as she tiptoes around the matter of asserting any gender upon said future partner. This is Finsbury Park, after all.

Radiohead man was so right when he once said: What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here. I want to be spiritual, I always have. I want to be in on it. I want to belong here. I have been known to text friends manically about attending church together this Sunday, or becoming Quakers, something is in retrograde, did you hear about that asteroid? On and on, meaning, please!

I own tarot cards, and they serve as a powerfully accurate litmus for my psychological ebbs and flows. Either I’m busy/in love or I’m reading my tarot every day. I know it’s bad when I get the fortune tellers on TikTok. It’s never anything useful like: stop showing men you fancy your Substack. It’s only ever that there’s a “divine masculine” energy in your field, a soulmate connection, he wants to protect you, he’s coming back, he can’t stop thinking about you. More reasonably, he can’t stop thinking about how bitter and strange I came off in that Substack. I am too funny on here to be sexy, of that much we can be sure.

I do also love astrology. JP Morgan once said that millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do. Well, I use astrology and I have it on good authority I’ll never have money of my own, ever. I don’t have the faintest idea of the causality of why having a Cancer moon predisposes one to depression, but I found out that I have such a moon after very many years with a chronic diagnosis. I don’t care how it works. That’s why I should have spiritual success, in general. To me the correlation is information enough. That is what I think I’m seeking.

And, of course, validation. Forgiveness- that has always appealed. I have always prayed. I think that’s what I am doing. I’m definitely asking someone for something. I’m also definitely feeling bad for not being more grateful. I was raised somewhat Christian, in a New South Africa where every faith’s holiday was a holiday. My mother would tell you she’s a Christian but she is definitely partial to woo, and much too woke for any version of Christianity that anyone living before this millennium would recognise. My father is a devoutly science-loving atheist. I went to an Anglican senior school and attended various aircraft-hangar sized, electric-guitar-band style churches throughout my upbringing. I do still love the bible. One of my favourite websites is www.bible.com where you can page through all the different versions of a specific scripture. This sort of spiritual thesaurus is a great muse to me. God is big in my poetic universe.

My favourite book in the bible is the Book of Job. I love how truly diabolical the story is, and just how explicit the suffering has to be to prove its meaning. Job is God’s biggest fan. Pure, blameless and the richest man in the land. God takes away absolutely everything he has from him as a test of his devotion (Scorpio vibes from God, not the first or the last). The worst part is that God literally does this all as a dare because Satan goaded him into it. No other reason.

Job goes on to exquisitely describe his misery. You’re supposed to be inspired, and embarrassed to have ever complained, I think. I just think it’s an absolute banger.

All told, I can’t get my head around the mythology. I am descended, in part, from Huguenots who ended up in South Africa. I posset that those ancestors of mine were simply too autistic to accept transubstantiation. What do you mean this *is* the body of Christ?? It came out of a tin?? And that tin definitely was not a virgin!! Anne Boleyn is on my suspected autism list, may she rest in peace.

I want to be good. I want to find all the good, and have appropriate reactions to all the bad. I want to know what’s going on, though it’s becoming clearer that I never will. God is in the trees. The meaning is somewhere in the medium. I don’t think I’m using the tarot cards correctly. Every time someone tells me my Substack is good, an angel gains its wings.