The Tower of Change: Giving Long COVID Grief a Sound with Angeliska Polacheck of Sister Temperance Tarot

Welcome to season 3, episode 10 of A Friend for the Long Haul - A Long COVID Podcast! I got the chance to chat with Angeliska Polacheck for this episode. Angeliska is the beautiful soul behind Sister Temperance Tarot. They have been voted best tarot/psychic in Austin, Texas for 11 years in a row! I found Angeliska on social media about 13 years ago, (via the great Austin connector, Spike Gillespie - whose work you should absolutely read) and as time passed we discovered that we have so much in common, including eerily similar astrological charts and health diagnoses.

Angel and I discuss:

• The profound shifts brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges of living with long COVID
• Personal growth and empathy
• The vital role of art and tarot in healing, but how it, and artists and healers, get commodified and dehumanized
• How chronic illness, disability, and cognitive dissonance impact an independent, small business owner
• Wellness culture and the "manifestation" of health
• Surviving as two disabled Generation X Capricorns with C-PTSD and neurodivergence
• Trusting your intuition when your nervous system is fragged
• What does community even look like anymore
• How tarot can support Internal Family Systems therapy
• Diagnoses of exclusion
• There's at least one Bjork worked in there

You can find Angeliska on Instagram and Facebook as Sister Temperance Tarot. If you're interested in booking a reading, you can do that via their booking schedule. If you're in Austin and would like to invite Angeliska to a safe event, you can find out more about events bookings here.

They also offer sliding scale rates for 1-hour phone sessions for people who hold marginalized identities that are experiencing significant money struggles. Sliding scale sessions are limited and priority goes to Black, Indigenous, queer/trans and disabled folks, so please only inquire about sliding scale if you are facing genuine financial hardship.

If you'd like to support me in my one disabled woman podcasting endeavors, I have an Amazon gift registry that is completely unhinged, where I just throw anything that I see and like. I also have an Amazon Storefront you can use to purchase goods. I also sell long covid tshirts and other products on a Bonfire storefront, and proceeds from that get funneled back into the podcast or used for community care. I also have an Etsy wishlist or you can just Venmo me at @afriend4thelonghaul. That also gets funneled back into the pod.

Over the last 1.5 years, I've built a playlist of my guests