The tarot cards are onto me, but then again, they’re always onto me, they’re omnipotent slips of paperboard. I didn’t use her name when I began the shuffle, but they know who I’m thinking about. I want to build an image that her name is flowing through my bloodstream and dripping through my fingers onto the cards, but the reality is less — it’s five PM, I’m in my childhood home wearing a pair of fluffy cheetah print sleep shorts, and I think that I’m going to vomit.
“Where will this relationship go?” I ask, letting my hands stir the cards. I had asked that question a lot already. Or, in keeping with tarot etiquette, I hadn’t exactly asked the same question, I respected my deck’s answers and did not dishonor them by trying to push for the one that I was seeking — it was just a reworking of the question, a clarification, “Hey, remember when you said entering this relationship would end in total destruction? Can you explain what exactly you meant by that? Asking for a friend.”
The cards eventually collect into a pile, and I draw the top card. The Knight of Pentacles faces me. I recognize him because whenever I ask about her, he shows up.
It’s a card of self-improvement. Self-love. Working on yourself, and connecting yourself to the world around you. To my expectant heart, that was a card of disappointment. It’s not like the other cards, with men and women sharing goblets and enjoying themselves at festivals. The Knight sits on top of a horse in the middle of a barren field, very much alone.
The magic of the cards dispels at my feet when I return them to their box, and again, I too, am very much alone.
Tarot cards, for the unaware, are a form of divination dating as far back as the 18th century. In theory, you ask the cards questions about anything from love to what to expect from the coming week, shuffle them, and receive your answer through the meaning of the card you pull. Each of the 78 cards has a meaning derived from years’ worth of tradition, covering concepts as broad as love, pain, and justice. But as anyone who has read tarot cards for a while knows, the cards are not always that straightforward. Sometimes they dodge your question or give joke answers. Mine have been known to take on an almost parental tone, scolding me for avoiding the real root of my questions and instead looking for a neat, tidy bandage through their answers [and yes, you can get that sort of message through just a handful of cards].
But like anything that exists on dubious, magical, and ultimately unprovable logic, tarot cards have long been used to exploit people looking for a quick glimpse into their future. People will pay any amount of money to hear that their futures will end up just fine [“You will meet a handsome, mysterious stranger…”], and these “psychics” are willing to provide for a handsome price. It’s always been a worrying trend, but with millennial culture pouring themselves into alternative self-care routes like reiki healings and pricey crystals, one has to wonder – where’s the line between practicing for self-care and practicing for false assurance?
And even if you’re not directly paying a scam artist, what if the only one you’re scamming is yourself?
To clarify, I’m not speaking against alternate self-care. This isn’t to provide a case against the increasing number of millennials exploring different religious, spiritual, and self-care practices. So long as it doesn’t dip into cultural appropriation territory [looking at you, every sorority girl who Hindu tapestries as “exotic” curtains for their dorm rooms] and it’s not hurting anyone, feel the vibration of as many crystals as you want. Read your palm backwards and forth. Bury slips of paper in your backyard with your exes’ names on them and sprinkle salt on the area. Life is far too short to dictate what brings you much-needed comfort and happiness.
I’m more concerned about when your reason for practicing these alternate rituals are less about self-care and more about freeing yourself from self-reflection, just as I was trying to use my tarot cards for [or, at least, trying to use them for — they weren’t exactly generous with me]. What about when you start using these practices to justify some asset of yourself without any sense of self-criticism? What if you’re using those practices to avoid some deeper issue within yourself that doesn’t just need to be buried, but faced head-on?
In my case, the only person pulling the wool over my eyes was myself. I wasn’t losing money, but I was losing precious time, distressing myself over this person. What if I had just listened to what my cards were telling me?
A general rule of thumb from true experts is that reading tarot cards has never been about getting the answer that you want — it’s getting the answer that you need. I believe that this is advice that can be applied to any form of alternative self-care, or, indeed, any sort of self-care. Why are you using self-care? Are you using it to genuinely repair the wounds you have accumulated over your day-to-day life, or is there something that you are circumventing?
By my own philosophy, tarot cards only have the power that you give them. Therefore, some part of me knew that it was time to divorce from my ideal of this girl. And yet I was looking for the card that would tell me that everything would work out — an easy escape to make my encounters with her a little easier, a little more hopeful. I wanted us to be like “The Lovers”, one of the most well-recognized cards in the deck: lost in one another’s eyes and only grounded by the grass at our feet. I wanted this so tangibly that I was pressuring an important form of my coping to conform to this ideal, instead of using it to acknowledge that fate would not work out in this way.
What good is a method of self-care to you if it’s keeping you in a self-repeating rut?
A change came over me when I made the following, brilliant revelation: “Maybe I should, like, I don’t know, listen to the advice I’m being given by my cards.” So my deck wanted me to practice self-care. Instead of sticking my fingers in my ears and rewording my previous question, I asked for them to elaborate. How can I practice self-care? What is keeping me stuck in my self-fulfilling prophecy of unchecked lesbianism [the cards might like to throw jokes at you, and who says that you can’t throw them right back]? I found that my cards, which I had previously thought were rather stubborn, were offering a wealth of responses to help me. Reading my tarot cards became less about finding false assurance, and more about developing practical adaptations to my everyday life that made me a happier, healthier person.
I acknowledge that not everyone has a self-care practice that is as “interactive” as tarot cards, or that are even spiritual in nature. Maybe you just like taking long baths. But sometimes, the most important thing you can do with your method of self-care is re-evaluating what role it plays in your life. Is it genuinely helping you, or are you using it as a crutch? If it’s the latter, you are not suddenly required to throw it out entirely and never look back. But you can certainly change the way it fits into your life, or what you get out of it. It might even become more poignant for you.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to ask my cards how they think my article will be received.
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