It was an ordinary workday, and I was using Google Maps to look up street names and waterways for a project. Google Maps opens to your current location, and as I was about to zoom out, I noticed a Turkish coffee psychic reader near my office.
My curiosity was piqued.
I had visited a few psychic readers over the years, but I had never seen one advertised so specifically. I had heard of tea leaf readings, but never coffee. I made a mental note to revisit it later, and my thoughts drifted back to a psychic fair I attended in St. Louis around November of 2021.
At the time, life felt uncertain in nearly every direction.
We were at the tail end of the COVID pandemic, and people still wore masks in public. I worked in an office built for fifty to one hundred people, yet on most days only three or four of us showed up. The company I worked for had decided to close the office and shift what remained of our project to its headquarters in Florida. Layoffs were possible. Maybe even likely.
Around the same time, my apartment complex informed me they were increasing my rent by five hundred dollars due to “market conditions.” I remember sitting there thinking: If I’m paying this much, why stay in St. Louis at all?
Like a lot of people during that period, I started looking for alternatives. Different futures. Different versions of myself.
Some of the ideas were serious. Some were ridiculous.
I considered starting a T-shirt company with awkwardly direct sayings meant to spark conversations. I explored the idea of publishing children’s books online using early AI tools and freelance illustrators. I even thought about creating a journal called Keeping It Weird.
I wasn’t unhappy with my GIS career. I was just tired.
Tired of contract work.
Tired of wondering where I would live in five years.
Tired of rebuilding my life every time a project ended.
As I got older, the constant movement started carrying a heavier emotional cost. Should I buy a house? Should I keep saving in case I lost another job? Would I end up moving again? Relationships became difficult to maintain when your future always felt temporary.
Sometimes adulthood feels less like stability and more like trying to balance on floating debris while pretending you have a plan.
It was around then that I saw an advertisement for a psychic fair being held outside St. Louis in Bridgeton, Missouri. I was curious. Skeptical, but curious. More than anything, I think I was looking for reassurance that my life was heading somewhere meaningful.
I remember driving there feeling strangely nervous. I wondered what kind of people would attend. Would they judge me? Would I feel out of place?
Instead, the building buzzed with activity. Booths lined the room with crystals, artwork, books, candles, and readers offering every kind of interpretation imaginable. People from all walks of life wandered from table to table, curious about themselves and each other.
As I walked around, my nerves slowly faded.
I signed up for several sessions: an aura photograph, a numerology reading, an intuitive psychic reading, and a past life reading.
The aura photograph fascinated me most.
The image glowed with blues and greens. The photographer explained that blue often represented introspection, calmness, empathy, and communication, while green symbolized healing, curiosity, growth, and balance.
The image did not feel dramatic or mystical. It felt familiar.
Quiet.
Thoughtful.
A little unresolved.
Like someone still trying to understand the world around him.
The photographer also pointed out a shape near my heart and suggested it could represent the presence of a protective loved one or companion. Whether symbolic or imagined, the observation stayed with me.
The intuitive reader focused less on prediction and more on emotional patterns. She quickly picked up on the guardedness I carried from past relationships and the sorrow attached to them. She told me I wanted connection but had become emotionally cautious.
I already knew that.
Still, hearing it spoken out loud by a stranger landed differently.
We briefly discussed my career, and she paused after I explained what I did for a living.
“That’s what your soul does,” she said.
The phrase caught me off guard.
Not because I fully believed it, but because I had never thought about mapping that way before. Until then, GIS had mostly been a profession. A skillset. A career that paid the bills.
But something about her wording lingered in my mind.
The numerology reader described me as someone pulled toward responsibility, fairness, and problem solving. Again, parts of it felt vague. Other parts felt oddly specific. She spoke about leadership and transition and suggested I would likely move within the next year.
At the time, I remained skeptical of nearly all of it.
The final session unsettled me the most.
The woman conducting the reading spoke about soldier imagery and described a figure on horseback somewhere in the British Isles. Armor. Conflict. Protection. Exhaustion. She discussed the possibility of carrying emotional residue from difficult experiences across lifetimes, comparing it loosely to unresolved trauma or anxiety.
I had no idea what to make of any of it.
Yet strangely, I also understood exactly what she meant.
Not literally.
Emotionally.
I walked away from that fair with my thoughts spinning in every direction. The readings themselves mattered less than the themes beneath them: transition, unresolved hurt, curiosity, emotional depth, reinvention.
Looking back now, I think what affected me most was not the supernatural aspect of the experience.
It was the feeling of being seen.
Not perfectly.
Not magically.
Just honestly.
Soon afterward, I decided to leave St. Louis. I narrowed my choices down to Charleston, Wilmington, and Virginia Beach. In the end, Virginia Beach made the most practical sense: affordability, family proximity, and job opportunity.
Months later, I found myself living near the Virginia Beach oceanfront, working remotely, and once again wondering what came next.
My job had grown stagnant. Work slowed to a crawl, and I spent much of my day searching for purpose in places it probably wasn’t going to appear. I explored ideas about teaching GIS, tutoring, freelancing, and countless side projects that never fully materialized.
Then I discovered the Edgar Cayce A.R.E.
For those unfamiliar, Edgar Cayce was one of the most famous psychic figures in American history, known for entering trance-like states and giving readings on health, spirituality, and human consciousness. His organization, headquartered in Virginia Beach, was hosting another psychic fair.
Against my better judgment, I went.
This time, the readings felt less dramatic and more reflective.
One young reader described me as someone who needed challenge and creative stimulation. He sensed that my work paid the bills but no longer fulfilled me. Then he said something that would stay with me for years.
“I feel like you’re supposed to create some kind of guide based on your experiences and photography,” he said. “Something that helps other people.”
At the time, I had no idea what that meant.
Another reader later told me I was looking at the wrong side hustles entirely.
“You’re going to be writing,” he said.
That one lingered.
Not because it felt prophetic, but because it felt strangely possible.
Around that same period, I eventually left my company and accepted a position with a local environmental consulting firm. The work turned out to be different in ways I hadn’t expected. It pushed me further into the cartographic and visual storytelling side of GIS. Instead of simply managing data, I found myself thinking more about communication, interpretation, and how maps shape the way people understand the world.
Still, the larger question remained unresolved.
What exactly was I trying to create?
Fast forward again to late 2023.
I was in New York City on vacation with a friend, wandering through side streets and exploring the city with no real agenda. At one point we passed a storefront advertising psychic readings, and almost jokingly, we decided to go inside.
The woman who read for us was remarkably perceptive. She gave my friend an emotional and deeply accurate reading. As for me, she said something simple:
“You’re not meant to spend your life working a nine-to-five for someone else.”
At the time, I laughed it off.
But somewhere along the way, those conversations, reflections, and years of uncertainty had quietly started changing the way I saw myself.
By 2025, The Mapping Poet finally began to take shape.
I had already purchased the domain name more than a year earlier, but I kept hesitating. I experimented with templates, writing styles, and ideas, but nothing felt authentic. Every attempt felt like I was trying to imitate a version of myself that didn’t quite exist.
Then one day, I stopped trying to force it.
Instead of building a brand, I started writing honestly.
About places.
About memory.
About overlooked moments.
About maps, symbolism, people, history, questions, and the strange emotional weight ordinary things can carry.
The psychics never told me to start a blog.
That part came from me.
But I do think those experiences helped me recognize something I had ignored for a long time. Not destiny. Not prophecy. Potential.
Sometimes other people notice dormant parts of us before we fully live them ourselves.
Looking back now, I don’t see those readings as supernatural roadmaps pointing toward a fixed future. I see them more as mirrors. Temporary conversations that helped me pause long enough to examine my own life differently.
In many ways, this blog grew from that same instinct.
The desire to look closer.
To search for meaning.
To map the unseen currents underneath ordinary life.
Maybe that is what a Mapping Poet really is.
Not someone who has all the answers.Just someone still exploring.