My friendly local astrologer looked at my chart early last year and said my Saturn’s Return would be “relatively pain free”.  But lately I’ve been wondering why I’ve been in a bit of a funk.

Then, I read this on a website:

You may feel weak and vulnerable. You want to move ahead, yet are frustrated by a fear of doing so, torn between a compelling urge to throw off everything connected with your past and an equally frantic need to cling to the familiar rather than brave the great unknown.

Even if your external world seems to be in order, your internal structure may feel as though it’s being assaulted with a battering ram. Nervous conditions, irritability, depression, insomnia, and feelings of insecurity are common. Most people go through some sort of identity crisis.

You can add nightmares to that list.  Disappointment.  Heavy boredom.  And an ever-deepening skepticism at a time when you’d be better off taking a leap of faith.

This is why I haven’t been writing.  I’ve been living on a mental diet of cheese puffs.  I’ve even joined the gym again – not just for physical fitness, but as an attempt to lower my mind-fat percentage.

If this is “relatively pain free”… holy shitballs, Batman.

…The year 2010 for Scorpio

1. Mysterious-looking dude with mysterious-looking website must have cred: Big love, wacky work, facing fears.

2. Yes but no but yes but…: You may get the biggest break of your career or maybe nothing will change and you’ll be bored with the same conditions, people, and prospects.  You may find love, or maybe you’ll break up, or perhaps nothing at all will happen.  Finances could be good, but they could also be bad.

3. I wish I could write jokes like these: “…if you were not here, there would be no world.  Or there might be, but you wouldn’t know about it…”

It’s not back yet, but I’m told it’s well on the way. Thankfully, I’m not talking about Christmas. I’m talking about every kid’s favourite planet to draw, Saturn.

Every 29.5 years, Saturn returns to the same point in space as it was when you were born. But what has a bigarse planet in the middle of nowhere have to do with us? Well, the astrologers say that the years either side of when “Saturn returns” are kind of a crisis zone.

Not necessarily in a bad way, however. Around this time, people often meet the love of their lives or find the jobs of their dreams, or they uproot and travel the world to see what else there is. In the years either side of 30, people supposedly cast off their ballast in favour of a more condensed version of their lives.

Sound vague? You betcha. These people explain it better than I do, though it’s still all very flowery, as you’d expect.

Of course, my publication’s astrologer tells me that I’m in a new lunar cycle and I’m also dealing with “a strong Uranian influence” at the moment. This is making me “crave emotional and intellectual stimulation”, giving me an “overwhelming urge to travel”, and making me “quite psychic”.

It’s true, I have been bored, my feet have been itchy (though that’s partly remedied with my impending trek to the Greek islands later this year – booyah!), and my gut feelings have been pretty damn sharp (sounds like appendicitis). I should play some poker before Uranus leaves my chart…

I’m on a bit of a learning spree, too. In the last six weeks I’ve started Greek language classes and Bikram yoga (that’s a story in itself). I’m still taking singing lessons too and with that the learning curve has suddenly become mighty steep (at the moment, the middle voice = brain explosion, but we’ll get there). The challenge really, really rocks.

Unusually enough, though, I’m not particularly stressed about any of this. Maybe the meditative effects of yoga are finally starting to kick in – my reason for getting into it in the first place. Inner peace. After all, you can’t be a belligerent psycho your whole life…

Itchy feet, casting off the ballast, seeking a new Everest… The collaboration of Uranus and impending Saturn, or just a pattern of being perpetually bored and indulgent and going from crisis to crisis just to amuse myself?

Whatever it is, there’s something in the air. I said it at the start of this year, and I’m still saying it – there’s something about 2008 that feels completely different. And if the last couple of months – especially the last couple of weeks – are anything to go by, it’s safe to say I’m right.

“You’re going to get married,” she says, slamming a card down in front of me. I jump a little, but that could be the product of one too many Easter eggs.

“There’s an offer in front of you and you’re just not seeing it,” she points to the card. It has a picture of a guy sitting meditatively under a tree, oblivious to the fact that there’s a shiny golden cup hovering at eye-level beside his head.

“I see marriage for you,” she says, “and soon.”

A free tarot reading I scored at last year’s Mind-Body-Spirit expo is to blame. That’s what started this mess of insatiable curiosity – that’s the thing that got the crystal ball rolling.

As I stood in a cube at the expo, a tarot reader gave me a one-card reading which yielded a spontaneous apparition of Raphael (the saint, not the turtle). Based on this, the reader said that deep inner emptiness awaits me unless I drag out my ylang-ylang-scented reiki pillows and my therapeutic sandalwood carved back massagers, grab myself an Astral Business Number and start “healing” people for a living. I gave this pause because, although I don’t particularly want to be a healer of any kind, I don’t want to be unfulfilled-illed-illed either.

But hey, I know how this looks. I sound gullible and so immersed in BS that I can’t even see the clear light of day. I know it’s nonsense. But why, then, did it spill over into “real life”?

Indeed, I had another psychic encounter – this time it occurred in the unlikely setting of a press junket. On the Tarago ride up to the resort, our host revealed that she had a knack for the esoteric. So, on the Saturday night of the trip, while the group of us journos were all kicking back at the hotel bar, we implored her to read our palms.

It was my turn. She took my left hand in both of hers, palm-side up, and scrunched it softly like a sponge. She studied the lines emphasised in my squished palm.

“I don’t see you staying in journalism, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Oh, that’s okay – neither do I!” I blurted a little too enthusiastically for someone on a media famil (it was the complimentary pear and lychee caprioska talking, I swear).

“You’re just a tourist where you work right now. Maybe a year or so at the most…” she said, seguing into talk of what else I do. I told her about my business and performing stuff, but how I wasn’t really sure where I was going or what I wanted.

“I think you need to leave all the questions to the universe for a while,” she said. “Let the answers come to you.” Another good point. For a hobbyist palm-reader, she seemed to have cred.

“Ooh,” she said, suddenly noticing something else in squashed crevices of my hand. “I can see a guy for you. He’s someone you already know and he thinks you’re the absolute bee’s knees,” she said.

I groaned. Just because someone thinks you’re the “bee’s knees”, doesn’t mean you want to be those knees. Or any part of that bee, for that matter – not even the feet, regardless of how intriguing it would be to have tastebuds on your soles.

“He’s someone you already know,” she repeated. I was about to protest, when something stopped me. Leave it to the universe, I thought. It’s a good mantra for me, the master of over-analysis that I am.

But mere insight wasn’t enough for me now. I’d had a taste of the unexpected and ethereal, and now I wanted a real psychic – someone who’s willing, able and fully qualified to peer into the spirit world and tell me stuff I’d have no way of knowing otherwise. I wanted Alison DuBois or the author of An English Psychic in Hollywood.

All of my predictions so far had been free. So I wondered if a “professional” reading would give me a more definitive experience.

And that’s when I saw it – psychic readings in the World Bazaar tent at the Easter Show. This was my chance. If I believed in fate, perhaps this was it, staring me in the face – much like the gleaming gold cup that I apparently can’t see hovering right in front of me.

“He’s someone you already know,” says the Easter Show psychic, pointing to the card.

So not only am I the bee’s knees for someone I know, but I’m also going to marry him? Oh, come on! I don’t wanna marry anyone I already know. It’s supposed to be someone new and mysterious who I meet in extraordinary circumstances – like hanging off a cliff or venturing out to sea or backstage at a rock concert or on the set of a feature film. I haven’t had nearly enough adventure yet to get married.

Besides, I’m the queen of over-analysis. I almost always see things coming (if you dream up enough possibilities, chances are one of them will be right). Wouldn’t I have seen something as big as this by now?

“It’s going to happen within the next year or so – two-and-a-half years at the most,” she reiterates as I feel the colour drain from my face.

“Is that disturbing for you?” she asks, with a tilt of her head, her steely green eyes fixed on my ashen expression.

“Well, it’s just not something I can see happening,” I protest.

“Where you are now is not where you were two years ago,” she says, “and where you’ll be in two years’ time you mightn’t be able to see yet. You’ll see the offer if you look forward.”

Ah, more insight. If I just wanted a session of insights, I’d ask my mum.

So it seems I still haven’t got my unobscured look into the chasm of the spirit world. Perhaps it’s chance or fate or the unveiling of one big cosmic candid camera, and not money, that will bring it to me.

Still, anything is possible. And I can’t help but feel I should make an inventory of every guy I know, just to address it in some kind of scientific way. You meet a lot of people in your lifetime. Even the ones whose hand you shake only once are people technically “know”.

Come to think of it, if we’re talking about people I know, well, I know hundreds.

Move over Jessica Simpson – there’s hope yet for me and John Mayer. Just leave it to the universe.

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?