'I've inherited my mum's witchy powers and honestly? It's creeping me out.'

My mum has always had 'the gift', as she calls it.

She can read a palm and see things about a person's past or future. The story goes, when she first met my dad and read his palm, she knew he would be the father of her children.

She can also use this power to do good things, and sometimes to teach people a lesson.

Once, when she was a little girl, her big sister was nasty and slapped her across the face. My mum put a curse on her and a few days later, my aunty became unwell with meningitis and had to have a spinal tap.

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Another time my dad made my mum extremely angry. He ended up being bitten by a flesh-eating spider that afternoon in the garden.

Now, up until a few years ago, I secretly suspected that it was all nonsense. A bit of hocus pocus and some good old exaggerating by my mum.

But then weird things started happening to me. It was during the pandemic lockdowns that I really became aware of it, perhaps because life slowed down so much.

I was going to throw out a cardigan that my mum made my son when he was little. At the last minute, I whipped it out of the op shop bag. 

That night, I was talking to mum and out of nowhere, she recalled a memory about my son in that blue cardigan. Right as she said it, I was looking at the cardigan.

Another time, I was thinking about an elderly man I used to talk to when I lived in London. He died a couple of years ago. That day, I randomly received a spam email from his account. 

One day my husband and I were walking along a street in our neighbourhood that we'd never walked down before. We were discussing whether to sell our property. 

Randomly, I decided to call our old real estate agent to see what the market value of our house might be. He said he had just sold a similar property and suggested we check out the address.

We were standing right in front of it. 

As the years roll on, these kinds of weird coincidences keep happening to me.

I did some reading about it. Analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung called it synchronicity – a concept that describes circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.

Jung believed synchronicities were evidence of a unifying consciousness at work in the universe, creating physical manifestations of what's happening in our psyche.

Some of my friends put it down to confirmation bias – the tendency to seek out information that supports our pre-existing beliefs and to ignore anything that contradicts those beliefs. Could be. 

But there are other things too. Sometimes someone will say something, and the words will be on the tip of my tongue. Or I'll be talking about someone I haven't seen in years, and then they'll text out of the blue. 

Twice in the last few months, I've messaged pregnant friends who've been on my mind that day, only to discover they've just given birth.

And on October 17, I reached out to an old school friend to whom I hadn't spoken in a decade. I saw a photo of her dad (who was my school teacher) and just had this feeling about him. He died the following Sunday, October 22.

Do I have 'the gift' too?

Feature Image: Netflix.