Sometimes Spirit puts me in people's lives in ways I don't fully understand until afterward.

There are moments when a reading becomes more than a reading. A person appears at exactly the right time. Information arrives in an improbable sequence. I feel an intuitive pull to go somewhere or do something that, logically, I could have ignored, and then I follow it. Sometimes what happens afterward feels like a series of anomalies and synchronicities, one event answering the one immediately before it. This is one of those stories.

A woman came into one of my livestreams asking for a tarot reading because she needed help making a decision. She was pregnant. But pregnancy wasn't the only enormous transition happening in her life. A couple of months earlier, she had chosen to stop using fentanyl cold turkey. She had stayed sober, but sobriety had left her in an unfamiliar and painfully isolated place. Most of the people she knew were still using substances in one form or another. The same people she would normally call when she needed friendship, support, or simply someone to talk to were often connected to the environment she was trying to leave behind. She had made the decision to become sober, but without a new community around her, she was beginning to feel conflicted and alone in that decision. She didn't want to go backward, but she didn't yet know what moving forward was supposed to look like.

And now, in the middle of trying to rebuild her life while sober, she was facing another decision that didn't feel entirely like hers. She believed she had two choices: terminate the pregnancy and maintain access to housing and transportation, or continue the pregnancy and potentially become homeless. But as she explained the situation, something bothered me.

I wasn't concerned with telling her whether she should continue or terminate her pregnancy. That decision belonged to her. The problem was that she wasn't really being given a decision. When your choices are do what someone else wants or lose the resources you need to survive, how freely are you actually choosing? An ultimatum isn't autonomy.

This wasn't the first time she had found herself here. She told me that variations of this same reproductive decision had followed her since she was very young. Again and again, pregnancy had become tangled with whether the people around her would help her, house her, support her, or withdraw those things. What she wanted often became secondary to what she needed to do to survive. All she had ever really wanted was the opportunity to become a mother when the circumstances allowed her to make that choice for herself.

Within my spiritual framework, I've often noticed that the same fundamental conundrum can appear in different forms throughout someone's life until something inside the pattern changes.

The details change., the people change, sometimes, the circumstances change. However, it often seems that the underlying question keeps returning.

So I started wondering whether the lesson this time wasn't actually, What should she do about this pregnancy? Maybe the deeper question was: When do you get to choose your own life?

During the reading, I kept seeing something outside the binary she had been given. There was a third option.

What if the answer wasn't choosing which ultimatum to accept?

What if the answer was reclaiming enough power over her own circumstances that she could finally make the decision herself?

What I Couldn't See on the Livestream

As we continued talking, the situation became much bigger than the question she had originally asked. Her sobriety had created another kind of isolation. Most of the people she knew were still using something. The people she would normally call when she was lonely, overwhelmed, or simply wanted company were connected to the environment she was desperately trying to leave.

She didn't really know how to be comfortable in her sobriety yet. She was sleeping on a mattress in a dirty basement, spending much of her time in bed, trying to survive one day at a time. Her relationship was complicated because her boyfriend wasn't sober. She was also dealing with consequences from the period when she was using, including a DUI and the resulting problems with her driver's license.

Part of resolving that situation required having a breathalyzer installed in a vehicle. But her vehicle had been totaled. That made her dependent on someone else allowing the device to be installed in another vehicle, and that cooperation had also become entangled with the pregnancy.

So now transportation, her criminal case, employment, medical care, housing and reproductive autonomy were all connected. Without transportation, getting to doctors was harder. Handling legal obligations was harder. Getting to interviews was harder. Working was harder. Getting out of the house was harder. And without employment and transportation, becoming independently housed was much harder. It was as if she was surrounded by barriers that seemed impossible to overcome. A very eight of swords moment, trapped by challenges too intimidating to navigate.

When somebody is overwhelmed, traumatized, newly sober, isolated and living in survival mode, it's very difficult to figure out which first step to take.

I Felt Like I Needed to Go There

The reading could have ended with the livestream. Instead, I felt an intuitive pull that I needed to physically intervene. This is not to say that it is an appropriate action to take in every situation, and discernment is important, but I couldn't ignore the call for help. I needed to show up. The same way she'd shown up for me in the past.

The next day, I happened to have transportation. I went to her house. She wasn't answering her phone, so I knocked on the door.

We have known each other since we were young. At a time in my own childhood when trauma had made speaking extraordinarily difficult for me, she was one of the people who helped me find my voice. Years later, somehow, I found myself at her door because I felt called to help her find hers.

I went downstairs and saw the environment she had been surviving in. We cleaned it physically and spiritually. We gathered laundry. We carried dishes upstairs. We cleaned out what had accumulated while she had been barely functioning. We poured out old piss jugs, and reset the room.

I also did a candle spell around the situation. Practical intervention and magical intervention aren't two unrelated things. They were part of the same act. This is what witchcraft and spiritual work look like in my actual life. Sometimes it's tarot cards and candles, intuition telling me to get in the car, or cleaning somebody's basement.

Afterward, I took her somewhere she could shower. We talked while driving from errand to errand, and a single message kept coming to the forefront of my consciousness. She needed to get out of bed.

It's not that addiction, trauma, poverty, coercion, depression or fear can be solved by simply "trying harder." It's simply that somewhere underneath everything that had happened, she needed to remember that she was still a human being with agency.

So I conveyed what I was hearing, and gave her the assignment:

1. Get out of bed as if you have something to live for, and the universe will meet you halfway.

2. Start behaving as though another life is possible.
   

The Breathalyzer Wasn't Just About a Car

Independence can be incredibly difficult to regain after periods of trauma. As much as we discussed the barriers she faced, we also discussed her needs and goals. Transportation was one of the most urgent pieces. She had been told that she needed the breathalyzer installed in a vehicle as part of clearing the consequences associated with her DUI, but her car was totalled.

She told me that her father didn't want to allow it to be installed in a vehicle she could use unless she terminated the pregnancy. But surely, there was a new perspective to offer. If her family didn't want her living there indefinitely, and she didn't want to remain dependent on them indefinitely, then transportation wasn't merely a privilege she was asking for. It was one of the tools she needed to become independent.

A vehicle could get her to doctors, legal appointments, job interviews, and work. All of which would also be alot more difficult with a non-compliant court order. Work provides income, which could become housing. Leaving her parent's basement would alleviate stress from all parties. Plus, independent housing could create the space in which she could make decisions about her pregnancy without those decisions determining whether she had somewhere to sleep. I suggested she talk with her dad about the new goals we created, and then I dropped her off.

Synchronicities & Signs

When I got home, I opened Instagram. One of the first things that appeared on my phone was a job opportunity. That alone wouldn't have been remarkable. But the details were. She had specifically told me that she wanted remote employment. It was remote. She was afraid employers wouldn't consider her because of her criminal record. The employer specifically welcomed people with criminal records and talked about giving people second chances.

After spending all this time talking about whether reproductive decisions are actually choices when they're made under coercive circumstances, the organization itself worked in reproductive-choice advocacy and helping people access abortion when abortion was what they chose.

Hours earlier, we had been talking about remote employment, criminal records, second chances and reproductive autonomy. Now those same themes were sitting together in a single opportunity on my phone. Spirit has a strange sense of humor.

Sometimes People Need a Catalyst

When someone has spent a long time in survival mode, things that appear simple from the outside can become enormous. Things like filling out an application when you have shoddy internet and forgot your passwords, figuring out where the most recent copy of your resume is, and impressing an employer can be incredibly difficult to begin imagining, let alone following through on.

A nervous system occupied with surviving today, can feel like planning six months from now is unrealistic. Trauma impacts memory and executive function in significant ways. So I helped her begin the application process.

Then she kept getting up. She spoke with her father, and something miraculous happened. He compromised. He agreed to allow the breathalyzer to be installed so she could begin resolving the transportation and legal barriers that had been keeping her stuck. Then, she told me she had multiple job offers. She sent a screenshot- her license was restored and her record was cleared. Yesterday, she told me she put a deposit on an apartment. All of this happened in around 10 days.

This was someone who had recently been lying on a mattress in a basement believing there was no hope. The simple shift in energy literally broke down the walls she felt trapped by. As she began showing up for her own life, and opportunities began appearing. Just because she listened when Spirit said "Get up."

I pay attention to patterns. When the same essential conflict keeps presenting itself across years and circumstances, I become curious about what sits underneath it. In this case, the repeating question seemed increasingly obvious to me.

Who gets to decide what happens to her life?

Maybe breaking the pattern didn't require choosing pregnancy or choosing abortion. Breaking the pattern required reaching a point where either answer could finally be hers.

That's why the third option mattered so much. It was about autonomy.

This Isn't a Rescue Story

I don't want to rescue people, I want to empower them. There is an enormous difference. People don't need another person to take control of their lives. They need someone to remind them that they are still human beings worthy of the freedom to choose. Sometimes I feel that Spirit puts me exactly where I need to be to do that. At the end of the day, I simply reminded her she had the ability to save herself.

It Also Showed Me What's Missing

When someone leaves an environment where substance use was woven into their social life, they don't just lose the substance, they often lose their communities. There are recovery groups, and those spaces can be incredibly important. Not every sober person wants to spend every social interaction talking about sobriety. That in itself can still be triggering.

Sometimes, people want to do arts and crafts, go to the movies, attend events and laugh with new friends. They wanna explore new healthier coping mechanisms, and enjoy experiences that aren't organized around intoxication or recovery from intoxication.

This Is What the Work Looks Like

When I talk about witchcraft, intuition, community work, advocacy, empowerment, anomalies, synchronicity, or being called by Spirit, I'm not talking about separate pieces of my life. It's all interconnected.

I don't always know why I'm being pulled somewhere when it happens. Sometimes I understand afterward. I cannot live another person's life for them. I cannot make their choices. And I don't want to.

What I can sometimes do is listen when Spirit tells me to show up, arrive at exactly the right moment, help clear away some of what is making those choices impossible to see, and remind someone:

Your life still belongs to you.

Sometimes the magic is finding the third option.

And sometimes the magic begins when someone finally believes they're allowed to choose it.