3-28-2025
For a while now, I’ve been navigating some personal struggles that I’ve been unsure how or if to disclose. (I’m still figuring out, exactly, how to talk about it.) But recently, the nature of these struggles has changed in a way that is forcing me to be more open about them. Last week, I had to reschedule multiple clients, explaining that I was dealing with a ‘family emergency’.
On Thursday, one of these rescheduled clients opened our session by asking how I was handling my emergency. I waved off the question, still unsure of what details I wanted to share, and asked what had brought them back to me now after their last reading a few years back.
“I’m moving, like physically moving to a new place, against my will and on short notice, and I’m really scared. I know it’s what I have to do, but I feel like I just barely started to find stability and community, and now I have to start completely from scratch. My anxiety keeps sending me back to my plans and ‘erasing the whiteboard’ to map everything out again, even though the facts haven’t changed. I’m so overwhelmed by all the practical problems that need solving, all the things I don’t have control over, all the things I’m grieving, that I’m leaving behind. I see this really difficult path ahead of me, and I’m terrified that I’m not strong enough to weather the storm. I just want to know if I’m going to be okay.”
Those aren’t the exact words they used; our situations aren’t exactly the same. But I heard in their voice a mirror reflecting my own life, once again - this time, before cards were even pulled - the Tarot made a convert of me.
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I’ve been reading Tarot for myself and others for over a decade - easily thousands of cumulative hours - and yet, every time I come to the cards, I am convinced all over again: Magic is real.
Most of the people reading this can relate to this feeling. “Put a finger down if you’re an overeducated, mostly-secular skeptic with religious trauma and an aversion to ‘magical thinking’ who, nevertheless, is constantly plagued with signs and symbols that simply cannot be ignored.”
For more than ten years, the Tarot has reminded me (sometimes aggressively) that I know far less than I think I do…. and that I know far more than I give myself credit for. This is especially true in my career as a professional reader. It’s one thing to experience profound self-understanding from something so silly and irrational as the Tarot.
It’s another thing to experience a complete stranger in a state of complete vulnerability, to watch them illuminate with the brilliant light of self-understanding, and to realize in that moment that everything I have said to them is also something I desperately needed to hear.
In a way, this is completely mundane. During that same decade-plus, I’ve spent another few thousand hours teaching sexual health education and social-emotional skills to youth, adults - really, anyone who would listen. I had similar experiences in all of those classrooms, seeing crystal-clear reflections of myself in my students - though they be younger, older, and otherwise different from me. We are all human beings, and if there’s anything that I’ve learned in a decade of sex education, it’s that we all have the same basic questions, concerns, fears, and desires. We are as similar as we are unique.
And yet. I’ve given so many readings in which the cards are directing me to say something I would never say to a friend. You may have even heard me share the anecdote of the first time I saw the Strength card (which I have tattooed on my body) in a negative placement for a client. But when I explained what that might mean, in spite of my absolute ideological rejection of the concept, my client softened and offered me something I hadn’t known I was hungry for:
“I know exactly what that means. The women in my family have always prided ourselves in being resilient. I’m trying to be strong, I keep telling myself to be strong, but in my heart I know that even if I could do this, it wouldn’t be worth it. I want to see myself as weak and fragile enough to say ‘no’ to enduring this thing that I know I don’t want any part of.”
I want to see myself as weak and fragile. A prayer for people-pleasers; an abjuration against hyperindependence.
A reminder that nothing - absolutely nothing - not even my own Strength - is always good or always bad. That when I am the most confused, lost, stuck, or perturbed, it is rarely because I ‘don’t know what to do’. I come to my cards and am reminded: I know the answers, but I need to see them in a different shape in order to hear them, listen to them, and believe in them.