But I’m not just single. At 38 years old, I have never been in a serious relationship. You read that right. That wouldn’t be so embarrassing if I were 20. Or even 27. But after nearly four decades on earth, I have managed to miss out on one of the most essential components of human nature: romantic love.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ve had boyfriends, bed buddies and dates. I’m not quite America’s answer to Susan Boyle. But I have managed to reach this age without a relationship that lasted more than six months. My teenage cousins have had more enduring romances. I’ve never experienced the agony of wondering if a marriage proposal was around the bend. I’ve never signed cards from the both of us. I’ve never even been able to bring a plus-one to formal events. If I were born a few generations earlier, I would have been relegated to house mother, schoolmarm or reclusive poet by now. Instead, I live in an age when female liberation allows me to recklessly dive in to any relationship I want.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what that might be.

Solitude set in early. I didn’t date in high school. Nothing quashes a teenage boy’s libido like a fat, near-sighted choir nerd. But that’s no excuse. Bad skin, weight problems and an unapologetic affection for show tunes didn’t stop my fellow dweebs from finding love once they left the harrowing halls of secondary education.

If I’m honest, I spent the better part of my life sabotaging myself. In college I wrote papers and poetry that decried the trappings of marriage and children. During my 20s, I hung out with men I knew didn’t have any long-term potential as spouses or baby daddies. In my young mind, dating the server with a great sense of humor and an intermittent cocaine problem was a good idea. I naively thought my affection could heal him, make him quit drugs forever and commit to me. Instead he got fired from the restaurant where we both worked and dumped me after a month.

From 19 to 26, I had several short-term boyfriends — a waiter here, an artsy-fartsy type there. During my undergraduate days in Arizona, a fellow theater major took interest in me. A few weeks after we began dating, he invited me over to play Trivial Pursuit with him and his friends, every man for himself. I was a single slice away from winning when I touched his arm and teased, “See, we should have teamed up. Now I’m going to have to beat you.”

He picked up my pie and hurled it across his dingy apartment, causing the plastic parts to scatter. I should have known we were doomed then. Instead, I figured it out when he brought a date to one of my performances.

“Relationships are supposed to feel good,” my mother said as I boo-hooed into the phone, stage makeup sliding down my face. “You’ve been miserable since you starting seeing him. That just isn’t right.”

It would be easy to blame her for my table-for-one status. My mom did everything to keep our home intact. She cooked, set mousetraps, drove my brothers and me to school and supported our activities while working full-time and caring for my ailing father. I had a very stable childhood, but I watched my mother work 10 times harder than the rest of us to ensure it stayed that way. To my over-analytical (if somewhat misguided) way of thinking, I associated romantic attachment with servitude. I vowed to not have to endure such a seemingly thankless effort.

Women in my generation just think differently about settling down. If you asked my mom, aunt or just about any woman of their era, they would tell you that loneliness is a choice. Of course, they were subject to repressive social mores that thrust them into the arms of someone by their early 20s. It led to a 50 percent divorce rate. (Though I should clarify that my parents were together until my father’s death and my aunt and uncle have been married nearly 50 years.) But that importance placed on marriage back then also prevented the existence of women like me — looking for the perfect piece of the puzzle that never quite arrives, supporting myself, but longing for a companion.

At times I think the sexual revolution really screwed me. My mom, who came of age at the dawn of the movement, taught me that I didn’t need a man to validate my existence. But she also raised me with retro convictions and the idea that sex should be reserved for marriage. I knew I wasn’t going to marry young like her, yet I struggled to embrace the power of my vagina. Many of my friends racked up multiple sex partners and didn’t think twice about one-night-stands. But the few times I engaged in such debauchery, I wound up with a personal infection that I interpreted as punishment for my transgressions. It’s not like I was raised in a home of hellfire and damnation, but I was terrified of disappointing my parents. I felt like an after-school special: The good girl drinks too much and does the dirty. In the next scene, she sits remorsefully in the gynecologist’s office, her heels digging into the stirrups of shame.

I can’t fault my folks for the kinds of guys I found attractive when I was young. Back then, I wanted the creative types who had potential to do great things but never actually did them. I met one such obnoxious but alluring dude during my Vegas years while waiting in line at the Einstein Bros. Bagels across from UNLV. He had blue eyes, just the right amount of stubble and wore aftershave that made him smell like a masculine ocean breeze.

Dates with the Bagel Boy consisted of anything we could do for less than $5. We listened to bad karaoke while feasting on a $2 French toast breakfast at Ellis Island Casino and Brewery. During $3 Bingo at Sam’s Town he enjoyed secretly exposing himself to me under the mess hall-style table. He was proud of his genitals and really enjoyed shocking me. Despite his crude behavior, I continued to see him because I found him irresistible.  Our most shameful cheap date came at the expense of a local Outback restaurant where he pretended that we had purchased a takeout meal but were denied our obligatory bread basket, so they gave us four loaves of fresh, free carbs. I hated the taste of deceit.

Bagel Boy occasionally threw gifts on my balcony: James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” But expanding my literary palate was by far the most satisfying thing about that relationship. He only wanted me on his severely limited terms and didn’t exactly believe in fidelity. My brother Harris still loves to say that things went sour with the Bagel Boy because he dipped his bialy into someone else’s cream cheese.

For the next few years, I tried meeting men on AOL, eHarmony, JDate, Hurry Date and at various religious and secular speed-dating events. But it was useless. I didn’t know what the hell I wanted and was afraid of picking the wrong man. My travel agent once said that when you go to a smorgasbord, you leave hungry. What good is having unlimited options if you’re too scared to choose?

The truth is, I’m ambivalent. On one hand, I want a husband and a child and all the milestones that seem to come so easily to most people I know. But I’ve become accustomed to the freedom of living alone. It requires little compromise and sacrifice. I love my (fairly) open schedule and the fact that I am only beholden to my pets. I never have to worry that a man will leave me if I don’t have one. I’m much more interested in emulating the woman my mother is now that her children are grown and my father is deceased: She is independent, successful and free.

Then again, I wonder about a life without children. My mother is my role model, but she also has a family of her own. That’s why I started to see a therapist, to work through all the conflict and fear and overthinking that keep me from getting out of my own way. Over time, I came to understand that it wasn’t necessarily my failure to find men, but that the ways I reached out might not be suited to me. Speed dating isn’t really the perfect fit for a timid woman who feels very far away from her own sex appeal, and who might always feel that way. And by the way, a lack of sex appeal might not even be a failure on my part; it might just be who I am. Although my hairstylist did suggest that I smile more. That sort of helps.

Two years ago a man I knew from one of my local hangouts sent me a friend request on Facebook. Within moments of accepting, he started to instant message me and make his prurient intentions clear. I told him that I wanted a relationship that would lead to marriage and children. He said he wanted those things, too, just not with me. I found his brutal honesty refreshing. No tension-filled dates, no discussing fake future plans, just a straightforward pursuit of pleasure. Since I’m not the kind of woman who exudes that come-and-get-it vibe, it was nice to be desired. I was lonely and aroused enough to take him up on his offer to meet.

But it wasn’t enough. I stopped getting together with him, and now he claims that he’s open to the possibility of us becoming more than hookup buddies. This always happens. The less interested I become in a man, the more he seems to want me. Weren’t these childish games supposed to end at some point? I know he’s just spewing the platitudes he thinks I want to hear. I know that if I were firmly committed to getting what I want, I would excise him completely from my life. But I just can’t. I know what I should do, and yet I don’t do it. And maybe that explains more about why I’m still without a relationship at 38 than anything I can tell you.

Instead of closets, though, I have stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. I have mountains of clothes, from Yumi Kim silk dresses to winter coats to dozens of pairs of fishnets, which live anywhere they can find a home: over doors, chairs and my couch, strewn across the floor, or crammed haphazardly into a dresser drawer. Don’t get me started on the towering stacks of books that periodically fall over onto me, or the years’ worth of magazine subscriptions, scrap paper, contracts and outdated VHS cassettes.

I’ve never seen the show “Hoarders,” but I always comforted myself with the notion that I wasn’t as bad as the people featured on it. I don’t have dead animals or hundreds of cans of tomato sauce I bought on sale. But while I can easily make that distinction, most anyone who walked into my apartment would be horrified, and rightly so. For a long time, I thought I was just “messy.” Then my mess evolved from something contained to my bedroom to a monster occupying every corner of my home. Food that should be discarded winds up in the freezer, beloved jewelry gets stepped on and broken, and I trip over my 25-pound Kettle Bell more often than I use it to work out. Like a high-functioning alcoholic, I have reached a point where I can no longer live in the hazy glow of denial. When I found that mice had eaten through not just my clothing, but also my cash (apparently they’ll eat anything) I realized I had a problem — a big one. I am a hoarder.

Five years ago, when my last roommate moved out, I let my hoarding freak flag fly … everywhere. Why not share the wealth? There was no one else to see it — I made sure of that. Whereas I used to bring home people I was dating, I’ve only had two guests in the last three years, one a date and one an interviewer, who only saw the neatest of the rooms and even then had to wait for me to tuck aside a pile of clothes so that she could fit herself into a chair. I had a long-distance relationship with a guy in San Francisco, and when he visited New York, I paid for a hotel room rather than let him get a hint of how I live.

Last year, I finally decided to hire a personal organizer. It was a big step, mentally and financially; for $5,000, she and her assistants spent a week sorting, tossing and clearing things out. When I returned home, after crashing elsewhere, there were 15 bags of garbage, not counting the magazines and newspapers for recycling. For the first time in years, I could see the floor.

I was thrilled, but also a little overwhelmed. Everything seemed to have its place, but where was mine? I didn’t know. The wide expanse of floor space, the smooth desk, seemed foreign, reminding me of the apartment’s emptiness when I first moved in. Gradually, so gradually that I barely noticed, my stuff started creeping back where it didn’t belong, until it again reached an unmanageable level.

I’d tried to hire an organizer a few years before, which was a giant failure. I was nervous but ready to make a dent in my disarray. I was quickly disabused of the notion that she could help me; she only dealt with mild clutter, and my mess was too much for her. I cried when she left, utterly ashamed that I was beyond the pale for someone who did this for a living.

Several friends have eagerly offered to help, their eyes lighting up when I describe my plight. They are the anti-me, people for whom the process of sorting and cataloging and discarding belongings makes them come alive, yet I couldn’t bear to have even those closest to me see the nitty-gritty daily reality of the extent of my problem. I was sure our friendships would be forever tainted.

I don’t consider myself materialistic; it’s not that I go on random shopping sprees so much as I have a very low threshold for what I “must” have. If I hear about a book I want to read, I’ll usually order it online rather than put in a library request. Yet once I get whatever item I’m hankering for, I don’t always put it to use (cut to the SodaStream I got as a birthday present last year, or the stereo I won in a contest, both sitting unused in my kitchen). The acquisition, whether it’s free or purchased, is what gives me a rush, not the use of said object.

My hoarding is also a portable activity; on any given day, you can find me carrying two giant tote bags, in addition to my laptop and an oversize purse. New acquaintances almost always comment on my bags, and people have recognized me when I’m out and about because of them. Carrying one bag feels almost dangerous. “Do you need everything in there?” someone will invariably ask, missing the point entirely. It’s not that I need every single item, but their existence, and my knowledge of exactly where they are located, soothes me. It means I am prepared, even if it’ll take me 10 minutes to find my inhaler or tweezers or Us Weekly.

I admit most of my things I don’t actually need, in the strictest sense of the word, but if you were to hold each up in front of me — as my organizer, who I am still working with, sometimes does — I’ll tell you I want to keep whatever it is. Give me the choice, and I’ll choose what feels familiar. As lonely as I may sometimes get, I have these objects to prop me up — sometimes literally. You never know what you might need … and that goes for the weekly Wall Street Journal crossword puzzles I keep in the hopes of someday getting to them.

Ever since I quit my six-liter-a-day Diet Coke habit, I’ve been convinced that we only make major life changes when we want to, not when other people want us to. The toughest part of this situation is acknowledging that, on some level, I enjoy clutter. My dream home isn’t some spartan utopia but one filled with items, treasures, keepsakes, with a place for everything (though not necessarily everything in its place).

There is something about belongings that I value highly, and it has nothing to do with their net worth. The Coco de Mer teacup with “Pussy Lover” in italics I treasure just as much as the giant Hello Kitty pillow I sleep with. The most expensive item in my house is a MacBook Pro. What I’m hoarding most of all are the memories intertwined with each item. The turquoise dress with the zipper I wore for an important first date? The K Records Lois 7-inch? It would feel like a crime to get rid of them. By getting rid of my stuff, I fear I’m getting rid of some essential part of what makes me me.

The rational part of me know that’s ridiculous. I was given a powerful reminder that you can’t take it with you when I attended my friend’s wake recently. We leave behind the legacy of our actions, our feelings, our words and perhaps our spirit, but our belongings are essentially worthless. I don’t want my stuff to be what people remember about me, something my loved ones have to sort through after I’m not here. For that matter, I don’t want it to be something that prevents me from living now — from having friends or lovers over, from having kids because I’m afraid they’d injure themselves amid my mess.

But I find it painful to reckon with this part of myself. I have no problem revealing that I’m into rape fantasies, but admitting that when I enter my apartment, bugs scurry away from me — that is much harder to own up to. At least once a month, I vow to devote myself to cleaning, to purging, to letting go, but it’s amazingly easy for other “urgent” projects to take priority. I want to change. I will change. For now, my home is my dirty, cluttered sanctuary. And I’m sorry, but you’re not invited.

I’ve been in denial about the number. I argue that, inside, I’m the same person I’ve always been. But the reality is that I can no longer easily do the things I love. The old, adventurous, unstoppable me decided to run the New York City marathon after one disciplined year of training — and finished in under five hours. When I met Jeff, I was a fit size 12, going daily to power yoga class. Lately, though, I’m always the biggest person in the studio. Where I used to stand proud and tall at the front, I now hug the wall or lurk behind a pole, hoping to escape notice. It requires courage to take my place in a room packed with bendy bodies in booty shorts; many days, I’m just not brave enough.

It’s tough to be a bad-ass girl in a dainty world. In a pole dancing class, I tried to conquer my fear of a tricky move called “the snake,” which involves flinging feet over head, gripping the pole between your thighs, dropping your hands and slithering into a coil of turgid sexpot on the floor. But when it came my turn, the teacher — a vegan ballerina — blurted, “I can’t lift you. I’ll break my back,” then walked away. In true fat girl form, I bit back my tears and gave up the pole for good.

It hasn’t always been this way. I was a fat kid until the eighth grade, when I went on a diet to get the part of Liesl in a local production of “The Sound of Music.” I lost the weight, got the part and more or less kept my figure in check for two decades. I never stopped looking at myself through fat eyes, though. Eventually, the weight started to creep up on me. I went from a plush hourglass to a brick doorstop. My thighs began to rub together. I began to sweat more. I noticed fat rolls. Actual fat rolls.

I ignored them, and hoped other people would, too. Bad plan. Not long ago, I stopped by my favorite downtown boutique, where the designer, a curvy blond goddess, tie-dyes vintage lingerie, transforming it into one-of-a-kind cocktail attire. It had been a while, and when I walked in, she met me with an ebullient, “Oh my God, when are you due?”

My heart dropped. I didn’t want to embarrass her. So I lied.

“Uh, you know … in the fall,” I stuttered.

She looked at me funny. When I grabbed an irresistible sky blue top, she winked at me.

“That won’t fit you much longer,” she said.

“That’s OK. It’s for after the — you know, for inspiration.” I managed a fake, shame-tinged glow as I left, knowing it was the last time. How can I go back without a baby?

Being fat colors every moment of my existence — even sleep because, according to Jeff, I snore like a jet engine. Unable to handle the racket, he built himself a bed in another room. When we make love, I undress as fast as I can. If he touches my stomach, I flinch. I worry that his eyes are closed so he won’t see me. After all, I don’t look at myself if I don’t have to.


There is no excuse for how I got like this. I don’t have a thyroid condition. It’s not raining Goobers in New York City. Every ounce of padding came in through my mouth, via my hand. Nobody did this to me. I did it to myself — one bad decision at a time. So how did it happen?

 In 1999, I briefly played Erica Kane’s prison guard on the soap opera, “All My Children” and wrote a one-woman show, “Guarding Erica,” about my experience. Writing and performing my own work was the most challenging and fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. As a result, I was offered a job writing for soaps. I wasn’t crazy about the genre, but I needed the money (substantial), not to mention the health insurance (excellent), so I signed on, promising myself to work on my own writing between soap scripts. But there was little time and less creative energy left after turning in my hundred- (or 200-) page assignment each week. I spent most of my time sitting at my desk in pajamas, or watching TV (“research”), drained and depressed. I was making a six-figure salary. Shouldn’t I be happy, I wondered? Instead, I felt stalled, stuck, guilty and fuzzy-headed. In order to muster the energy and mental clarity to work, I used food, jacking myself up on coffee rich with whole milk, sucking down chocolate “energy bars” and Gatorade when I felt overwhelmed — which was most of the time. My doctor prescribed antidepressants, which made me hungrier, then fatter, thus more depressed, so she upped my dosage, which made me hungrier, fatter and bluer, still.

Then “As the World Turns,” the last show I wrote for, was abruptly canceled. There were goodbye parties … with plenty of photographs. When I saw myself plastered all over Facebook, I was shocked at how puffy, frumpy and uncomfortable I looked. As I untagged myself in picture after picture, I wept with embarrassment for the artificially jolly, fat, middle-aged schlub I’d become. It was a life or death moment. Either I had to stop the shame spiral, or permanently lose my way — and possibly my life. 
 That’s when I said, “Hell no.” I want more time with my husband, my nieces. And there are stories I need to tell. So I made a choice, walked away from soaps and got to work on own writing. No more excuses. Now, it’s time to take off the force field of fat I created for protection, so the world can see me, and I can fall back in love with myself.

Alone at my desk, paging through fitness and fashion magazines, it seems an impossible distance from here to there. But I’ve been at my goal weight before. That trip began with one choice. Then another. And one more after that. No bacon. One extra push-up. Walk instead of ride. Love myself, if only for a minute. Tomorrow, maybe two. In my mind, I know I am more than the number on the scale. More than a bag of dirty laundry. Now, I just have to believe it.

On the day I ran the New York City marathon, the sun was so bright, the sky so azure that it gave a Technicolor feel to Central Park. I rounded the bottom west corner of Park Drive and saw the finish line up ahead. Because of my steady training, I still had gas in the tank, and I wanted to leave it all out there on the asphalt. With 26 miles behind me, I started to sprint. I passed dozens of runners, and as I did, I felt my smile open up, unbidden. Strangers on the sidelines began to shout my name (which I had written proudly on my shirt for exactly that purpose). I soared across the finish line, arms raised in victory. I had run 26.2 miles alongside 25,000 other dreamers, powered only by my heart, my will, and my determination not to quit. When it got tough, I told myself to run to the next landmark, the next mile marker, the next corner.

I try to imagine the romance of waking up every morning on equal terms with the world. My heart lifts at the thought. A smile slides across my face. No more fat girl. One landmark at a time. 

I also feared that a real job with a desk, entry-level salary and 401(k) would become my permanent station in life — as if working at an insurance company or bank right out of college would handcuff me to that industry for the next 50 years. So I moved to Las Vegas, which seemed like the perfect place to hide from the grown-up world. Knowing my parents would only support such nonsense if I stayed in school, I enrolled at UNLV — also known locally as the University of Never Leaving Vegas — to pursue a master’s degree in theater.

Lacking the abs of steel required to pull off the tight, shiny getups of the Vegas showgirl, I took a variety of odd part-time jobs. I made $6 per hour job coercing vacationers to sit in an auditorium, watch screenings of crappy sitcoms and fill out opinion surveys. Then I played the role of a soda jerk at the World of Coca-Cola museum, where angry tourists heckled me once they learned that I wasn’t actually allowed to serve them anything to drink.

Dejected, I scoured the classifieds. Then I saw it:

“Phone actors wanted. Work from home. Make your own hours.”

Could it be true? Or was this some sort of telemarketing scheme? I called the number. A friendly man assured me that this was completely legit.

“You’ve heard of the Psychic Friends Network, haven’t you?” he asked. “This is just like that.”

Yes, I had seen the commercials. My brothers and I mocked the company’s spokeswoman Dionne Warwick. When we were little kids, our parents took us to one of her performances at a Lake Tahoe hotel. She sang a few songs, coughed and asked for water. It was a short show, and my parents were disappointed they had wasted money on it.

“The thing is, I’m not sure that I’m psychic,” I confessed. There were times I suspected things were going to happen before they did. But did knowing my family was going to throw me a surprise party for my 15th birthday count as mystic instinct?

“That’s OK,” he said. “We’ll give you everything you need for the job.”

I called my mom for advice. She wouldn’t hesitate to tell me if she thought this was a bad idea. We both believed in psychics. In fact, one of my mother’s closest friends had this power. Although Grace was elderly and forgetful, she was truly clairvoyant. She even adopted a rottweiler for protection because of a premonition she had about being robbed. One day she left the dog at home, and she was held up.

“As long as you can work from home, I think it’s fine,” Mom said. “You’re insightful, and you can probably be very helpful to people.”

I attended one short training session, where I filled out a 1099 form so I could become an independent contractor. (That sounded so glamorous, until I learned that this meant I would get reamed when it came time to file my taxes.) The trainer said that some of their contractors made thousands of dollars and worked constantly. He stressed that we didn’t necessarily have to be psychic to do the job; we could learn how to perform a tarot card reading to achieve the same effect. I bought a deck along with an instruction booklet at one of those psychic specialty bookstores that sells more crystals than books. I also had to get rid of call waiting. Aside from the obvious distraction, it posed too big a risk of disconnecting conversations. Callers got my undivided attention. Considering I couldn’t tell the future, it was the least I could offer.

The main thrust of the job entailed keeping clients on the phone for as long as possible. At $5 per minute, some lonely, needy or desperate person could pay hundreds of dollars for a chat. (By the time I joined the 1-900-number business in 1998, laws had been passed to automatically end the calls after an hour. Too many sad sacks had racked up thousands of dollars in phone bills they would never be able to pay. After lots of complaints, the government intervened.) The company lured callers with the promise of three free minutes, but as soon as they heard the beep, the meter started.

As a professional phone psychic, I would earn $7/hour until I logged in 20 hours of calls. Then I would get a bump to $8/hour. The ultimate goal was to work my way up to $15/hour while the company pocketed the rest. I never made it that far.

The trainer had also suggested that I create a nom de phone. So clients knew me as Anita, the name of one of the nurses at UCLA Medical Center who cared for my father in the first days after his liver transplant. I associated her with kindness, healing and nurturing, a good omen. At the beginning of each conversation, I told callers to ask me a question, shuffled tarot cards and tried to interpret what they meant.

Anita had only positive things to say about everyone’s future. Trust me, no one wanted to hear otherwise. I had never called a psychic hotline, but Mom’s friend Grace had read for me in person. (She didn’t use cards.) Positive or not, I didn’t always agree with what she said. Naturally, I liked the occasional bits of conversation when she told me the things I most wanted to hear, like that I was going to (eventually) find lasting love.

So I gave every card a positive spin. “Oh, I see we’ve pulled that Death Card. How exciting! You’ve overcome a lot. This means good things are going to happen for you.”

In response to what most women wanted to hear, I said: “Well, of course you’ll find love. And soon.”

And for men: “A new career opportunity will give you lots of options and more money.”

About half of the callers were onto me immediately. They would tell me that they thought this was nonsense and that I was a fraud. The first surly customer I encountered pummeled me.

“Thank you for calling. This is Anita. Is this your first reading?”

“I don’t believe in this garbage,” Angry Man said.

“I’m so sorry you feel that way,” I said in the most chipper tone I could muster. “Have you had a reading before?”

“No.”

“I’m shuffling my tarot cards.” My voice got higher. “Now ask me a question, and we’ll see if they can give you some of the answers you’re looking for?”

“OK, genius. What’s my wife’s name?”

“Oh,” I stammered, “It doesn’t really work that way. That’s not really what I do. I …”

Click.

I panicked. The trainer said that if too many calls ended before the three-minute grace period, and monthly calls didn’t average a minimum of 10 minutes, the company would dump me.

So I tried a different tactic, agreeing with people’s concerns about psychics and 900 numbers and convincing them that I only spoke about what the cards revealed (as if I actually understood how to read them properly). People liked the idea of the cards having power instead of me. Some customers still screamed and quickly hung up. But a surprising amount of skeptics enjoyed telling me off for several minutes to vent their disgust while intermittently asking about their futures.

But I began to realize why I got rejected from the theater program in college. My role-playing skills sucked. This job came more easily to others. My friend Russ, a talented actor, worked for another psychic hotline. He thoroughly enjoyed perpetrating a fraud. He told me that he started each call by saying that he just drank a vial of lamb’s blood to give him fortune-telling superpowers.

“You can’t be serious. Does that really work?”

“Some idiots believe me,” he said. “But most people just think I’m funny, and we wind up having a nice talk.”

A few of my calls lasted an entire hour and consisted of me reassuring the person on the other end of the line that everything would be OK. Those folks really didn’t give a damn about psychics or readings. They just wanted to talk to a friendly voice. Some people had terrible problems and cried a lot. I had a list of crisis hotline numbers to give to those who confessed to thoughts of suicide and other equally alarming problems. I kept these calls short, told the troubled souls on the other end of the connection to save their money and gave them toll-free numbers for help.

An 18-year-old caller from Alaska helped me more than I helped him. He wanted to know if he should enlist in the military so he could pay for college. He talked about the long, dark days of Alaskan winters and the exciting prospect of being stationed in a warmer climate. He spoke longingly about the way this choice would take him to places he had never seen. He didn’t have any money, and his parents were gone.

I cringed. How was this poor guy ever going to pay for this call? My stomach hurt. I identified with his uncertainty, his searching for a place to fit in, and his desire to escape, but I had a safety net. He didn’t. That’s when it occurred to me that I had no business trying to guide anybody’s major life decisions. I had enough trouble with my own.

“So what do the cards say, Anita?” He sounded so hopeful.

I stared at the untouched deck in front of me. “Honestly, I don’t know. I think you should talk to your friends and relatives. Or maybe ask your pastor for advice.”

We had only been on the phone for eight minutes, but I told him I had to go. He didn’t get mad, which actually made me feel worse. That’s when it dawned on me that burger flippers, toilet scrubbers and those who facilitate elephant mating had cleaner jobs (and probably took more pride in their work) than I did. My psychic days ended with that call.

In retrospect, the only satisfying tête-à-têtes during my stint as a telephone psychic came from errant horn dogs who thought all 900 numbers were created equal.

“Hi!” I began. “What is your question for me today? What would you like to know about your future?”

“You sound hot.”

“Well, aren’t you nice! What would you like to find out about today?”

“You know what I’m doing?” he said, panting.

Once I met my 10-minute minimum, I gave up trying to steer the conversation toward my fake tarot reading. “Oh yeah, I know.”

“Well, what do you think about that? Do you like it, baby?”

“Fine by me,” I replied. “You’re the one who’s getting screwed.”

My colleague had worked in prisons, and he formed a distinct dichotomy between people who were dangerous and should be locked up forever, and those who just liked to get high and shouldn’t be locked up at all. He referred to the case of a guy who was ridiculously drunk when he ran out of beer. He then took a gun and went to the mobile home of his neighbor, whom he robbed at gunpoint for a 12-pack. The drunk man was sentenced to seven years in prison.

“Is that fair?” my colleague asked the audience. Another professor sitting next to me nodded and said, “He did the crime. He should have to do the time.”

I looked at her. She knew me quite well. We had been friends and colleagues for several years. In fact, I had once been her teacher. But I realized that she had no idea I was one of those bad people, one of those people who had violated the law and deserved punishment. I wondered if I should say something.

I decided not to because I didn’t want to embarrass her. Besides, the right answer to his question of fairness was not “yes” or “no.” The right answer is that perhaps the drunk robber should have done some time — long enough to sober up and choose another path, but not so much time that functioning in society would be difficult if not impossible when he got out.

When the time came for comments, I raised my hand and said that I believed programs were necessary for all inmates, not just the ones who wound up in prison because they were caught with a few blunts. But even my colleague who had worked in the prisons didn’t seem too concerned about the well-being of violent offenders. He thought they should be locked up forever.

That’s when I had my “It’s a Wonderful Life” moment. I thought about all the things that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been locked up forever: the beautiful, gifted daughter who wouldn’t have been born; all those students I wouldn’t have taught; the friendships that would never have existed; the books and articles I would never have written.

I am so grateful that when I was a prisoner there were programs that engaged my mind and helped me figure out a different path. I am so grateful that a kind judge looked at me and thought that I was salvageable. I am so grateful that there were people who saw beyond the idea of punishment and offered me another chance.

I’m not saying there aren’t people so damaged that they may never be able to make it out here without hurting other people. Certainly there are some. But we owe it to ourselves to create opportunities for people who have made mistakes (even serious mistakes) to turn their lives around and to become productive citizens.

So here’s my mortifying disclosure: I am an ex-con. I am not one bit proud of it. But I would be even less proud to be one of those who are willing to throw away someone else’s daughter, son, mother or father because of some petty notion of revenge. In fact, that’s downright shameful.