Last Sunday was the second time that a psychic had told me I should be a healer.

“You’re a healer,” said the vaguely blonde tarot reader from Byron whose stall I was visiting at the Mind Body Spirit Expo.

Reading the skeptical look on my face, she shrugged at me. “I can only say what I see.”

Thinking that it didn’t really matter what she saw or not – that my life will be whatever I want it to be – I encouraged her to continue. If nothing else, I wanted to know the significance of the “Hello and Goodbye” card that I had pulled out.

“I see green – the colour of healing. And Raphael is standing over your right shoulder. He’s whispering ‘tell her, tell her’,” she said with a tepid little laugh. “He’s the patron saint of healers.”

I was glad she pointed that out. For a second there, I was imagining a six-foot turtle wearing a red bandanna and holding two ninja daggers.

“Have you had an interest in being a healer? Therapies, massage, counselling?”

I thought about it. Had I ever wanted to be a medico or a shrink or a crystal-wielding aromatherapist?

“No.”

“Do people come to you with their burdens?”

I thought about one friend of mine who is the emotional rock for so many people that she and I have decided she is the “Agony Aunt of the Universe”. I’m definitely not like her.

“Not really. Only the people who are close to me,” I said.

“If somebody told me 10 years ago that I’d be doing what I do today,” she went on, possibly reading my mind – or at least, my facial expression – “I’d have said ‘pass me another drink’ or ‘pass me another joint’.”

Looking into her slightly glassy eyes, I suspected the latter might still be in her repertoire.

“I see you’re chasing something at the moment, something that’s been all through your past, that you’re emotionally attached to.”

I had a flash of myself in acting classes at 16. Using debating as a disguised form of stand-up comedy at 17. Drawing tears and laughter at 20 in my favourite-ever stage role…

And then it was all washed away by a wave of heaviness. All the times it’s felt too difficult, when I’ve thought I’m not good enough, when it’s felt pointless, and when I’ve just wanted to walk away from it all…

“Let it go,” she implored me. “Let it go.”

It’s one thing to think “I’m jack of it”, but it’s another entirely to have someone else tell you to “let it go”. I mean, why should I? Why should I let go of all the things I wanted to do? All the years of training and trying and failing and succeeding and questioning and learning and imagining? Let go of all the ambition and enthusiasm… that I think I’m starting to lose anyway?

Uh-oh.

But if I give up, then what will I be? At least when you’re chasing something, there’s a goal in sight – a vision of success – and that becomes a part of you. Who is this hippie to tell me I can’t be successful? I’ll be whatever the hell I want!

“You can be a highly successful, rich and powerful businesswoman,” she said with slightly scary timing, “or have men falling at your feet,” she barely gave me a second to react to that one, perhaps knowing I’d laugh.

“But unless you do what your soul was put on earth to do,” she ploughed on, ominously, “you will be… unfulfilled.”

Unfulfilled, unfulfilled, unfulfilled-illed-illed – the word echoed inside my head for the rest of the day like a poisonous gypsy curse or a Celine Dion song. Something about that word rings uncomfortably true.

Of course, it would’ve mattered less if I hadn’t been told almost exactly the same, seemingly incongruous thing before.

About six years ago, I called a radio psychic and asked about my career path. He said he could see me being a nurse or a counsellor – something with healing involved.

In those younger, more bravado-filled days of mine, I shrugged it off as nonsense. I knew what I was chasing – or at least I thought I did. I also knew that hospitals made me anxious, that I’d run a mile before I’d watch someone spew, and that I was stuffed if I knew how to solve people’s emotional problems.

“Third time lucky,” said one of my friends who witnessed my one-card tarot reading. “And I think you should actually pay for one this time.”

Money won’t buy my fulfilment, but will it buy me a more satisfying psychic reading?