Forever Alone | Chapter 4: Signs & Synchronicity (Part 2)
In which I question the existence of God, flirt aggressively with a boy dressed as Jesus, get stalked by Sting, and develop remarkably witch-like powers.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
Fresh off my conference high, I asked for a sign from my grandma as I drove to Maryland to help my younger brother move. My grandma had always been fond of hummingbirds—as a kid I loved watching them flit around the feeder that hung outside the kitchen window at her house—so I asked for a hummingbird-specific sign. On the way to my brother’s apartment I stopped into a smoothie shop to get breakfast. When the guy behind the counter handed me my drink, I noticed there was a hummingbird on the cup. Then my eyes widened as I looked up and realized that the whole place was covered with hummingbirds—it was the logo of the smoothie shop. I had to stop myself from laughing out loud in front of the strangers in line.
Shortly after that, I read a book called E-Squared, by Pam Grout. It’s a fun (almost silly, really) but powerful little book that teaches you how to do 9 different energy experiments to prove that your thoughts create your reality. She starts you out really easy—ask to see something specific, like a beach ball or a very particular color of car. The day after I started, I came across a deflated beach ball in the woods as I was walking Scarlett. And the morning I started the car experiment—I decided I wanted to see sky-blue cars—I saw at least 5 on my drive to work.
That was fun, of course. But it didn’t exactly blow my mind. We all know that the brain will naturally start noticing things it hasn’t noticed before when you start actively looking for them. But then, that morning I was seeing all the sky-blue cars, as I pulled onto the side street to park at the law office, I literally couldn’t pull into my spot because it was being blocked … by a sky-blue SUV. I laughed out loud again, because OK, OK Universe, message received.
The more I played with the Universe, the more signs and encouragement I got. Kristen and I quickly started trying to manifest things in our budding new business. Once, we went on a walk and decided that when we came back an hour later, we’d have 8 new requests—no more, no less—for more info about our latest offering. And when we got home … we had exactly 8.
Sometimes the Universe would even lovingly poke fun at me, when I needed it. One day, when I was particularly worried and frustrated about how the launch of one of our courses was going, I sat on the couch and pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt, wanting to marinate in my own gloominess. That night, Kristen and I decided to watch an episode of LOST to distract ourselves—I’d been introducing her to the show, since she’d never seen it—and at the very end of the episode, the camera slowly pans in on Charlie, sitting moodily on the beach. The last thing you see before the episode ends is him pulling the hood of his jacket up over his head in slow motion. Kristen and I practically cried we laughed so hard.
Yes, there was plenty of fear and angst to go around in business, but the more we trusted, the more money started showing up at the exact right moment it was needed. Clients came through out of the blue, from the most random places. Opportunities to speak or present at an event popped up just when we thought we’d hit a worrying lull. Clearly something was going on here, even if I couldn’t explain exactly what it was or how it was working—and that something allowed me to slowly start releasing some of my controlling death grip on everything in my life. So, naturally, I wanted to focus this newfound power onto my singledom—maybe it, too, could be transformed by the magic of the Universe.
Given that I was a life coach opening myself up to the wonders of the Universe, it’s not surprising my interests snowballed in an increasingly woo-woo direction. In the spring of 2015 I met an energy healer at a fellow coach’s moving away party, and I quickly started seeing her once or twice a month. Heidi had, and still does, a warm and grounded presence, and I needed that. I might have been starting to relax and trust more, but most days my anxiety still outweighed my ease. I wanted someone who could help me work through my fears on multiple levels, practical and esoteric.
Heidi also had a powerful intuition. If you’re basic, you’d say she was a little bit psychic. At various points she’d share things about the future partner she sensed for me, like his hair color and what our kids would look like, and visions of future dates we’d go on.
Hearing little nuggets like that always excited me and gave me hope—like maybe something really was going to happen, eventually. Once, Heidi said, “I think you’re going to find out later, after you meet this person, that you’re somehow connected in a way you didn’t realize. Like six degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Later that night, Kristen and I went to a kitschy diner where they play music videos on a TV while you wait to be seated, and who should be dancing across the screen except Kevin Bacon, in Footloose.
In hindsight, it’s not surprising that as soon as I started releasing a lot of deep, old gunk that was clogging up my inner world, I started accessing my own intuition in a profound way.
I was meditating one afternoon, a few months after meeting Heidi, when a very clear visual popped up in my mind’s eye. It looked like a military logo—like the Navy or Marine Corps logo, if I had to guess. Not exactly something I think about on a regular basis … so I immediately wondered if maybe my future partner was a military guy.
Then, not too long after that, while I was staying at my parent’s house for Thanksgiving, drifting off to sleep in my old childhood bedroom, I had another very clear visual pop into my mind. Except it was less an image and more of a brief snippet of film. The first thing I saw was a guy—tall, dark hair—in blue-ish fatigues walking on the deck of an aircraft carrier, holding a clipboard or something like that. Then, the same guy, in a dark room with reddish light—like a control room of some kind, with lots of buttons and knobs. Needless to say, I didn’t quickly drift off to sleep after that. I laid there, wondering if I’d just made it all up, or if I’d somehow seen through a wormhole in space and time.
Shortly after that, I woke up one morning repeating a name, over and over again in my mind: Michael Gilchrist. I had enough experience with my intuition now that I knew not to dismiss these kinds of things, so I pulled up Google, but I couldn’t find anyone or anything that made it make sense. I did, however, find out that St. Michael is the patron saint of soldiers. And I discovered that “Gilchrist” is a Scottish last name, which intrigued me as a lover of Outlander.
Obviously, the next time I saw Heidi I presented all of these signs and visions to her. As she closed her eyes and did some Reiki on me, she, in turn, saw an image of me in a wedding dress, standing next to a guy, with a Scottish tartan in the background—a very specific combination of blue, green, and yellow.
A few days after that fascinating revelation, I found myself getting absolutely stalked, for no apparent reason, by Sting. As in, the lead singer of The Police. I could NOT escape hearing his songs, which is strange considering none of them are exactly current. I even saw a friend share a book on Instagram called Sting—no relation to the singer. So finally, I sat down and Googled him. I learned he was born in Northumberland—on the border of Scotland—and that his actual first name is Gordon.
I had a vague idea that Gordon was a Scottish name, so I dove deeper into that, and was correct. Clan Gordon is a big clan in Scotland. As I scrolled through the Wikipedia page, my mind went blank when I saw that the tartan of Clan Gordon was the exact blue, green, and yellow combination that Heidi had just described to me days earlier.
It gets weirder. At one point shortly after that I kept seeing a movie pop up on the TV guide that I had no interest in, but also felt like was stalking me. When I finally bothered to look into it, the main character’s last name was “Gilchrist.”
And then, perhaps the piece de resistance of my newfound witchy powers—one morning I woke up repeating a 7-digit number in my mind, over and over again, just like I had with “Michael Gilchrist.” I typed the numbers into Google—turns out, they were an incomplete phone number—but all the phone numbers that started with those digits were from the same place: A small town in Scotland called Johnstone. And wouldn’t you know, the Clan Johnstone tartan is almost identical to the Clan Gordon tartan? The same combination of dark blue, green, and faint yellow.
If there was any part of me that wasn’t a believer, I became one after that. The specificity of the signs was insane, and they didn’t slow down. Once, I dreamed about the name of a dead language—Cumbric—that they only spoke in what’s now Northumberland, birthplace of Sting, right near the Scottish border. And speaking of dead languages, I once woke up with a Latin word in my mind: Aluit. A-L-U-I-T. It means, “supported.” I’ve never studied a second of Latin in my life. The Universe was speaking, and I was clearly an open channel.
One summer evening as I was walking Scarlett, I got a very clear thought: “You need to do online dating.” I immediately clammed up. I HATED the idea of online dating, and always had. It’s hard to explain to everyone who thinks it’s no big deal, but for me, the prospect was sheer terror.
You know that scene in E.T. where E.T. comes out of a closet wearing a dress, a blonde wig, and a little bowler hat? Online dating made me feel like I was E.T. in a wig, surrounded by a room full of skinny, gleaming Bachelor contestants—awkward, out of place, and painfully alien.
Then, of course, the Universe doubled down. That evening I found myself clicking on the Instagram profile of a business coach who, on her about page, said she met husband online after she moved to the U.K. A double sign!
And the next day, I was trying to find something to watch on TV when a movie came up that, I kid you not, was literally titled, “She Met Her Husband Online.” It was a terrible title for a movie, but it was clearly my sign, and I knew I couldn’t ignore it. So, with MUCH trepidation, in the summer of 2015 I decided to sign up for Match … and then nothing happened.
This was Chapter 4: Part 2 of Forever Alone. Read on for Chapter 4: Part 3!