Monthly Archives: May 2026

sometimes, i just know things.

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It’s something that I’ve said to multiple people on multiple occasions. Regardless of if it makes me feel like I’m suffering from imposter syndrome, it makes me “sound crazy,” if someone clearly doesn’t believe me.

Sometimes, I just know things.

I don’t always know how I know these things — some of them just pop up in my head, like a random idea. Sometimes, I look at something or someone and just know something, as if they’ve told me themselves.

And sometimes, I dream them.

The dreams have been happening since I was very young. I remember being at a sleepover in elementary school — maybe I was nine or ten years old — and I turned around to look at my friend’s basement stairs and thought, “I’ve done this before.” It has happened SO many times since then. Some of them are just flashes of familiarity, and others are full-on recreations of things I’ve absolutely felt and seen. It took me a long time to realize that I’d dreamed these things before they happened, and I don’t remember the dreams until it’s actually happening.

It’s a very odd sensation. The familiarity feels comfortable a lot of the time, but during others, it’s really, really intense, and it feels like there’s something else I should be remembering, too. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this sense of intuition and these “premonitions” I’ve had for almost as long as I can remember. It was pointed out to me during that tarot card reading I had about two weeks ago. The reader said to me: “You have a lot of intuition. You already know things. You get all kinds of messages, and you’ve been ignoring them.”

That sentiment has stayed with me since. I know my spiraling thoughts breed anxiety, and it is so hard to slow them down and feel like I can breathe. I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to tap into things I already know so that they’re a little clearer to me and will help me move thoughts that don’t serve me. I just want to feel okay when I know I’m powerless to stop things that have been happening.

I bought a playing card-sized deck of tarot cards a few years ago. The images on them are really awesome — they’re much more like modern art than traditional cards, which makes me want to look at them. I started reading the guide that came with them and was soon really, really overwhelmed — it didn’t seem like something I had the capacity to engage with at the time. So, they sat on the end table in my living room, next to my go-to spot on my couch.

As I mentioned in my last post, I feel like I’ve been scraping at whatever I can to try to change my mood. I just want to feel better. I want to be reminded of things I know. While it did feel a little pathetic to pay for someone to tell me things will be okay, I think it did work. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been studying my tarot cards, reading about their meanings, and the different ways they can be interpreted. I really like the idea that you can look at the artwork and decide the story or the message for yourself. For example, yesterday, I pulled The Lovers during my first spread. My card has a man and a woman facing each other, but it looks like the man is being pulled away. The woman has her hand wrapped around two of his dreadlocks. I really, really liked this image. It instantly made me think of people who are drifting away from each other, maybe through unseen forces, but don’t really want to leave. They’re both looking at each other, and the woman still has a literal hold on the man — I really loved that this was the first thing that came to my mind when I looked at the card. I realized it pertains to several different things that have been weighing on my mind, not just in a romantic sense.

Last night, albeit feeling a little silly, I went back to the shop where I’d had my reading — my reader explained that there would be a Blue Moon Circle class that I might find to be helpful, especially since I’m interested in strengthening whatever intuition I’ve always had. Surprisingly, I was nervous going in. I’m not sure why — I think I just felt a lot of things at once, and honestly, I didn’t want to cry in the middle of the session. There’s been less crying lately, but I still feel very much on the verge a lot of the time. I really am lucky to have my cats — they are so attuned, and they’ve both stayed so close to me, as if they know I’m about ready to break.

Anyway, I went in and said a shy hello to the eight other women gathered, and then the circle began. I told a blue candle about the things I wanted to let go of, and it joined the other lit ones in a vessel. While I didn’t have a specific question to ask of the tarot deck, the leader of the class pulled one for me.

It was The Truth.

I automatically felt a little better about my choice to attend the circle, especially when a deep meditation began. There was a sound bath involved, which I’d never been exposed to before, and it really was awesome how the tones quieted things down in my mind. By a few minutes in, I felt much more relaxed as I listened to the guide. She told us to visualize standing by water, looking up at the moon, and imagine an almost-glittering light coming down from it. As the next tone played and she repeated the word “moon,” it happened.

That strange, strange sensation of familiarity, but this one was so much stronger than the other ones I’ve had. It was like something had pressed me, hard, in the middle of my forehead, and there was a faint hum on the left side of my head. I saw the shoreline of Tallac Beach at Lake Tahoe. I remembered standing in the toe-numbing water. I remembered how the moon had never looked as bright as it had in the Nevada night sky.

I think I may have dreamed it before — the meditation, the guidance, the actual words. But the feeling was completely different. All I could think was “I’ve been here before. I’ve done this before. This is supposed to happen.”

There were different energy pulls. There was a difference in the things I was thinking. When we came out, I felt more at peace than I have in weeks. Meditation is awesome — I remember learning about it and the skeptic in me being difficult to convince that sitting quietly with your eyes closed could bring calmness. HA. Right. Me, my own Scumbag Brain, and silence. The perfect ingredients for the most intense panic. But I did learn how to do it, thanks to one of the first therapists I met with in Nevada. And it takes practice, but it does start to work, if you concentrate. I still use it if I can’t fall asleep at night.

It was a little harder to visualize some of the things in this particular circle — spirit guides or angels, any numbers that might’ve come up, any advice you could hear — but all I could think was that I need to pay more attention to those kinds of strange “dreams,” the ones that told me things I already knew. All I could think of was that when I repeated certain things to myself — things that I “just knew” — they became tangible. I could see myself sitting in the sand at Tahoe, writing things out in a notebook — things that I “just know.”

I walked back to my car clutching optical calcite and tiger’s eye in my hand, and I wondered about the things I’ve been ignoring. How I’ve dismissed the idea of manifesting. The ways I’ve been using my energy that haven’t been serving me.

When I got home, I decided to look through my collection of blank notebooks to pick one for the kind of writing I saw myself doing on the beach. A smoothly covered blue notebook with a quill on the front has been tucked under the journal on my nightstand for the longest time. I couldn’t even remember where it came from. Today, I took it into my living room and opened it. When I started reading the first few filled out pages, I remembered.

I bought it when I lived in Reno.

I bought it and started to write all kinds of things I was thinking and imagining when I was out in the desert, when I was close to Lake Tahoe. When I was close to the beach that I could see in my mind last night.

And today, I know that I feel a little different.

play your cards right.

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I want to talk about rage.

Not the kind of rage that hits you during a bad commute home, when someone cuts you off and you have to slam on your brakes and almost stop breathing. When you can’t lean on the horn hard enough or spew enough horrendous insults. This one is bigger.

I have trouble being angry. That’s not a huge surprise to anyone who actually knows me or has heard me talk about it. I don’t get angry easily. I don’t get angry often. And when it happens the way it has happened recently, I don’t know what to do with it. It’s no secret that I struggle with depression and anxiety—I’m as open as I can be about it, mostly because I want other people to feel safe talking about things they need to—and all I keep thinking about is that decently well-known phrase: “Depression is rage turned inward.”

When I get angry, I turn it into sadness. I think I’m probably too good at being sad, since I’ve certainly spent a lot of time doing it. I think maybe sadness feels a little more natural to me. I can feel awful with a good reason, not just one that has nowhere to go. But let me explain something I’ve been trying to practice for the last two-ish years—the 180s. I’ve been trying to reframe my thoughts and behaviors more intensely since the beginning of the year, because I came to a stark, scary realization: I don’t think I’m going to make it if I keep thinking the way that I do. So, when something anxiety-inducing pops up in my brain or when I’m on the verge of tears about something I can’t control, I try a 180: I think about what my instinctual reaction/thought would be, and I do the complete opposite. It was working out really well. There were some blips and bumps, but for the most part, every 180 I made was a clear move that put me into a different headspace where peace was the most important thing. Nothing is worth more than peace, to me. I know that. I’ve known that. But I feel like I’ve gotten so angry that peace isn’t a concept I can even fathom.

It started a few weeks ago, when I was on my way to visit a friend who had sent me really unhinged, really inappropriate text messages the night before. I’m someone that needs to do serious talks in person. Texting is impersonal, and it’s too easy to misinterpret tone. Phone calls just make me anxious. I’d rather look at you and realize that this is something happening between two human beings with faults and emotions. I always want to hear about how someone else thinks. So, I arrived at the house and walked inside, like I usually did when I came to visit, and checked two levels before locating my friend, asleep in the basement. I saw him, and I wanted to turn around and leave. The next thing I knew, I had woken him—abruptly—and was as close to screaming at someone as I think I’ve ever gotten.

This is the level of angry that I’ve only reached a couple of times in my entire life. It is white-out mad, when it’s nothing but fire and smoke in my head, and words loosed like a band of arrows from the back of my throat. A lot of archers showed up that afternoon. Arrows flew with abandon. I don’t know where a lot of them landed.

I am certainly not saying this wasn’t absolutely deserved. It was. This was some high-level disrespect that had been happening for months, and when I couldn’t 180 it, not really the way I wanted, I 180’ed into complete rage. I don’t even remember everything I said, but things just kept coming, even after I wasn’t as crazy angry, and I felt like I couldn’t stop. And of course, after I had calmed down and returned to my normal human form, I felt sad. I was so sad to have spoken to someone like that, even if they deserved it, so sad that who I am and what I wanted from this was not at the forefront of my action. I was still upset with my friend, but all I wanted was to hug him. Which I did, later. And I did get a chance to talk out some things in a more composed manner.

While things seemed like they were going to calm down a little, they absolutely did not in the coming days. The situation most definitely took a 180 itself, and went from tough, but manageable, to impossible and impassable.

And now, I feel like somebody else.

My mood had been so great for about three months. I had focused so hard on changing how I think about things, and I was so excited and proud of myself for feeling like I actually was living a different life than the one I felt sentenced to. My therapists had even commented on it. But it felt like all of that work had been balled up tightly, into a tiny thing that couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

For me, being in my 40s has brought back a lot of things. I remember who I was as a teenage Jacks, the passion and enthusiasm I would steer toward creativity, the strong, strong sense of who I was. It felt really good to grab her hand and pull her out of whatever crevice she’d been tucked into for too long. But I also got to remember what it felt like for her when she couldn’t get things out, when she was shoved into that crevice, and her thoughts became snakes in the dark, wrapping and wrapping themselves around her, sizing up their next meal.

I don’t know where my strength has gone. The confidence I had in changing thought patterns, the progress I was so happy to be making—I don’t know where it is. All it is now is rage, and it feels like there’s no outlet big enough for any of it. What do you do when you know what will make you feel better, but you’re not afforded the opportunity? When it took you so long to finally name it, finally embrace the things you know that help you, only to find them completely obsolete against a wall of silence and shadow?

My thoughts have not been my friends. They have been snakes. And it’s an infestation. They make me think about things I don’t like, things I won’t do, things that feel like they came from somewhere else. Even when I’m engaged at work, or caught up in an episode of a show that I like, or hanging out with Maddox and Mambo. I hear them, hissing from where they’re watching everything. It’s more than Scumbag Brain, which I’ve talked about and written about before.

I have been so desperate to feel better over the last three weeks. I feel like a pauper at a coronation parade, hands scraping at the road for some kind of scrap of merriment and prosperity. Oh, and it was my birthday last week.

Instead of buying myself something a little shiny or a little more expensive, I bought myself my first-ever tarot card reading. I’ve been thinking about it since it ended, and how it feels pathetic to be so despondent that you actually try to pay for happy thoughts or ideas. I sat with the reader, and—just like in my kitchen during a solo dance party, just like in my bed when I tried to quiet things down with a nap, just like when I was in the middle of feeding the boys—I started to cry. My throat tightened, and I literally could not use my full voice to apologize for things not turning out the way I thought they would. She had a lot to say about the things I don’t, and the way it makes things worse for me, and how it buries me underneath so much heaviness.

She asked me if I ever blogged.

It’s funny how things come full circle sometimes. How I used to use written words to say the things my voice couldn’t. How I’ve stepped away from it, even when I know it will work. We talked a lot about opportunities. She reinforced how my words have always been a life ring tossed into storm-grappled water, not just for me, but for people around me. I feel like I’m crawling back on to the shore, in tatters and depletion. And I’m wondering if anyone is listening.