78 Little Secret Weapons

Or Tarot for Me, All for Me

I was asked recently if I still do tarot as a practice and not just for zine material.

Of course I do. It’s one of the ways I know I’m on the right path.

It’s not that these little cardboard pieces decide what’s right or wrong for my education or future career. But they can help me understand why a thought keeps nagging at me or whether a path is a good fit for my skills and interests.

Nothing quite rivals well-tuned intuition, but tarot helps me get to the root of my feelings. It’s helped me tell the difference between being fleetingly in love with an half-formed idea and feeling confident about sticking to something longterm. It’s also fantastic for shaking off bad dreams, almost as effective as following a meditation video. (And I’ve been having some really bad dreams lately. I guess I should start playing Minecraft again to stop the Creeper dreams.)

Tarot rarely predicts anything with 100% accuracy, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised a few times.

My MLIS program’s collection development course has the reputation of being baptism by fire among students. Successful candidates who’ve long since moved on still talk about it as though they survived a battle.

Last fall, I had to take this prerequisite. Out of the three professors teaching it, I got the one that was notorious for being hands-off. They would answer half of your questions—and give half-answers for those. To make matters worse, simmering beneath all this was the fermenting chaos of my online life, determined to infect everything else.

Desperate for even a faint glimmer of hope, I did a few readings. The cards suggested I was doing better than I believed and had a good chance of passing. Of course, this hinged on my actions, which, despite my constant anxiety, I was determined to carry out.

That should have calmed my nerves, but I still wasn’t convinced. Something would throw off that reading’s forecast, because my actions weren’t the only factors in this equation. I’d turn in a revised paper that wouldn’t be to the professor’s liking; she’d be in a mood and grade accordingly. Our group project would somehow miss an unstated requirement that rendered the rubric useless. Or she’d be rushing through papers at the end of the semester and slap a random number on mine.

Still, I put in the work—then resigned myself to retaking the course. I tried to think of my inevitable failure as “having a cheat code” for next time… unless they overhauled the class, which would be my luck…

That ordeal stressed me out so much that I couldn’t even check my grade until February. When I had to record my grades for internship paperwork, I opened the university app on my phone and handed it off, unable to look myself. I braced for the number from that dreaded course. At least an 80. A B-minus. Something in the B range so I wouldn’t have to take that fucking class again…

I’d passed with a 96%—a solid A.

Three months of needless worrying and dooming. Old habits do die hard.

One of my daily readings even hinted when I might step away from some online activities, though it couldn’t give the exact timing or full reasons why. That’s what I like the least about tarot. For a divining system that can reveal so much, it can’t quite nail down when something might happen.

A quick search will turn up all kinds of attempts to assign seasons or timeframes to the suits. Some readers swear these methods work, though I imagine they require some wiggle room. For myself, the best I can get is a vague estimate and favorable conditions. Answers can include soon, when X happens, when you do Z, or when you feel Y.

But it’s never foolproof. More than once, I’ve pulled the Eight of Wands—expecting swift progress or a message—only to find things stalled or derailed by someone else’s decision. Maybe the card reflected the momentum at that moment before everything shifted, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

Right now, I’ve found it more useful to do readings about my future career: how I feel about certain paths, what actions I can take to improve my chances of finding work, what my values are at their core, and what kind of people I want to work with (if I had a choice).

It’s been especially helpful in reminding me of what I already know: I want to offer clear, no-nonsense guidance (Queen of Swords). I seek projects and partnerships rooted in equity and fairness (Six of Pentacles). I value a balance of logic and emotion (King of Cups). And I want to work with people who are creative, imaginative, and emotionally mature (Page of Cups) to balance out my Queen of Swords work ethic.  

Despite its frustrations, tarot is a tool I’ll probably use for the rest of my life. It’s been a great help—and it could be a great help to others if they were willing to accept that sometimes life is just unfair.

But I’ve stopped using it to give advice to people who come crawling for help. Not everyone is upfront about their situation, so I’d pull cards for vague insights. Yet when I inevitably pulled cards suggesting ways to improve things, I’d get pushback.

I’ve come to realize that most people who bring me their problems don’t actually want solutions—they just want to vent. And that’s fine. Venting has its place. But there’s only so much kvetching I’m willing to tolerate. If you keep coming to me with the same problem, still unresolved, after running the same tactics on the same people for the hundredth time… I’m going to wonder what the hell you’re doing with both of our time.

Maybe it’s because I’m making slow but visibly tangible progress in my own life, and they want to know what magic bullet I found. When I tell them it’s just a matter of taking action, throwing away what doesn’t work, and accepting some hard truths, they brush it off—if not outright sweep it off the table and onto the floor.

Of course they do. They’re looking for instant fixes and asspats. “No, just reassure me that everything I’m doing is right and I don’t have to do any hard work! Tell me my repetitive actions will result in something different!”

“Okay, honey. Just keep going, believe in yourself, you’re doing great, and you don’t have change a single thing in your life. Somehow, when you least expect it, a miracle will happen without you having to lift a precious finger.”

Bitch, I don’t give pep talks and I hate affirmations. The changes I’m making now are because I’m done with bullshit and I’m making some hard decisions. I don’t like all of it, but it needs to be done.

Unfortunately, some of those hard decisions include holding my tongue, especially when I hear the same story for the uncountable time about a packrat roommate and the endless excuses for avoiding a real conversation about the growing clutter.

Maybe if they’d been willing to listen to the Eight of Cups, they wouldn’t still be telling the same story.