Journeying into Tarot

September 6, 2023

You may have found some of my recent posts to be a little odd. Let’s get into it.

Please note any product links contained within may be Amazon affiliate links. At no extra cost to you, I may earn a few cents.

A Little Backstory

In 2023, I chose to leave a career in software engineering to pursue the publication of my novels and reconnect with myself at the same time. This was a scary choice, and I spent months planning, talking it over with my partner, and researching what I could about the publication process. I was in a high-paying job, choosing to walk away from a steady paycheck, but to this day, I still feel confident that this career path was not the right one for my long-term happiness. (I’m sure I’ll write more about this at some point.)

Since I’d spent over a decade working in the same geographic region in the same field, I have met many people who I think are excellent engineers and whose opinions I deeply respect. But throughout these years, I could never shake the feeling that I was living as two (or more!) different people — my ‘work self’ and my ‘normal self’ — and having to play these parts correctly had begun to take a serious toll. I want to be genuine in my relationships (as noted previously), and having this ‘work self’ made it so difficult for me to figure out what to share and what to keep to myself. I don’t mean anything political, although that has been a balancing act of momentous difficulty at times; I have also had to stand up for myself as a woman in a male-dominated workplace, and that was always my genuine self coming out. I refer to the part of me that obsesses over vampire mythos and supernatural folk tales, the parts that never stopped yearning to believe in magic, the “hippie-dippie woo-woo” Jamie that is curious about everything, and I mean everything. I had many ‘work self’ friends I wanted to cautiously bring into a closer circle to discuss more than the tribulations of software development or generic office small talk. But I did not know how.

Software engineers are, by and large, critical thinkers and skeptics. I consider myself a skeptic for the most part, too. For example, not every ‘bad vibe’ is a ghost haunting your house; maybe it just hasn’t been deep cleaned in a while; sometimes there may be evil spirits, but sometimes you have environmental toxins in your air, and it’s fucking with your head, etc. But I want to believe in the supernatural, in magic, in all things wondrous and impossible to explain. I’ve never lost the yearning for a secret door that will take me to another world. I just need more evidence to find that belief than some people do. Whether or not I believe in the same magic or religious aspects, I still want to know about the traditions and practices that people hold dear. I deeply desire to understand the human experience. I find the concept of sentience to be bafflingly wonderful.

However, as my personal curiosity persisted, I was never sure how to connect with engineers at work on any subject that was approaching ‘spiritual.’ In 2021, I started letting myself be curious about things I had previously ignored. I began to question why I had the beliefs that I did, and I could not provide any evidence except “other people around me looked down on this subject, and so I did, too.” I realized I had lost my younger self’s ambition to stay open-minded until I tried something for myself. Around this time, I picked up a Tarot deck at a local witchy store.

(Quick side note: I’m going to use the word ‘witchy’ here and there. The concept of “being a witch” is something else I have lots of thoughts about, and it’s too much for this blog post. I’ll write a follow-up at some point; for one thing, this word has changed in meaning over the decades, as I’ve discovered throughout my reading. I use the word ‘witchy’ in these blogs to describe places and activities that include both Wicca and paganism as well as non-deity-specific rituals because I live in a predominantly Christian society founded on Puritan beliefs where these things are often considered equivalent, and this is a simpler, quicker way of encompassing a variety of things without being too pedantic. Even dressing ‘witchy’ is now a whole vibe in itself. It’s also a fun word. I mean no disrespect to anyone’s practice or belief system.)

Falling Out and Back In

Honestly, I didn’t have much luck with my first Tarot deck. I picked one that came with a book, thinking it would help me, but I was immediately confused by its discussion of using this suit instead of that other traditional one, choosing different words with subtle changes to meaning, and so on. I didn’t know there was a “traditional” deck. I thought they were all functionally the same. After a few spreads left me curious but primarily confused, I searched for books about Tarot and found Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack.

Wow, I had never considered some of these subjects, and I don’t mean just Kabbalism and the history of the Occult. Thinking about life as a series of journeys, or analyzing the aspects of myself as archetypes, allowed me to frame myself with a system similar to video game design or fictional character writing — things I had studied in college — and begin to see patterns in myself that I had never identified before. 

Not to mention the history of Tarot itself, which was much different than I would have guessed. In short order, I added Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler to my library. I had no idea what it meant to be pagan or neopagan, a witch versus a Wiccan, or that these subjects had been hotly debated for years. I had a lot to learn — and in many ways, I needed this insight to improve the worldbuilding of my novels. I dove in, fascinated, hyperfixated (without realizing it).

By February 2022, I knew something needed to change, and I would not come out of my grief without help. Additionally, for months, I had seen more and more posts on social media regarding ADHD and neurodivergence, but I lacked the ability to dig into the subjects, even if they were very relatable. I still remember sitting in a fog one weekend morning, doom-scrolling on my phone, and somewhat randomly deciding to sign up for Cerebral. I could get a digital appointment with a provider and a therapist. (As of this writing, Cerebral no longer prescribes stimulant medication, and I am not sure what they do for diagnoses of ADHD anymore — it also varies by state. Your experience with online providers may vary.)

Without knowing much about ADHD in women, I filled out the questions and talked to my provider, and she diagnosed me. She pointed out that I may also be experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression but suggested those issues may change as my ADHD was addressed. A few days later, I started weekly therapy.

It couldn’t have been at a better time; I had huge changes coming my way with my work and my out-of-state family. Stress took on a whole new meaning. Therapy was monumentally important to my development, and I’m still working on many things as I write this in September of 2023. By the summer of 2022, I could pick up my Tarot again. I remembered reading the first part of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom felt good before I forgot what that was like. I returned to the book and started over with a traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck in hand.

Methods and Revelations

By August, my Tarot spreads resonated with me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I don’t know where I first saw the Writual Planner advertised, but in September, I preordered their 2023 planner and was provided a free PDF of the last few months of 2022. I remember carrying these printed pages with me out of state and all throughout the tumultuous season as my family dealt with the passing of my beloved grandmother. With Writual’s framework, I had the structure to track my cards and allow more patterns to emerge. I began to admit to my inner circle that I did this every day.

I typically designated my daily three cards as “Energy of the Day, Focus On, Avoid.” I would draw one extra card on Monday morning to represent the week ahead, and I would do a 6-card draw for each new moon, full moon, and at the start of a new month. I just followed the planner here. I did experiment with other spreads when it felt right, but honestly? Finding time for more than one in a day is usually beyond me. I kept this routine, drawing the cards before work and making notes on the thankfully-limited space, which required me to cut my tangents short.

The more I kept up with this, the more I began to see unusual occurrences that I couldn’t rationally explain. Certain cards would come up in higher frequencies as other situations in my life were unfolding. The frequency of those cards would change when major changes happened to me. For example, I struggled with the weight of my familial obligations and continued working through this with my therapist. I was forced to confront things about myself that could not be ignored. This inner work resulted in some hard conversations with my family that helped me shed my unreasonable personal expectations. The cards before and after this series of events drastically differed, centering on burdens, balance, and responsibility.

In another example, I had similar feelings of dissatisfaction with work. Company reorganizations and being assigned new managers are not things that any corporate employee can control, and these external forces raised more questions about what I was doing with my life. The cards began to reflect this draw to a higher path, a disconnection from my intuition, a feeling of being “stuck” and dissatisfied. I considered job-hunting and even did a few interviews, but I ended up looking at a transfer to another team instead. I now had a great manager and team, which once again excited me to show up for work. 

After the family situation above had been resolved, these cards of being called to something else kept showing up despite my work improvements. My great manager and team were overhauled after the first of the year, once again reminding us that corporate management will sometimes treat us like interchangeable parts. I had another new boss and a different set of responsibilities; I was definitely unhappy. I wasn’t just drawing cards about being stuck and underappreciated — I was getting constant external validation from my close friends at work about the poorly handled managerial choices that left many of us feeling unseen, bored, and underutilized.

This was a time of many long therapy sessions, to say the least. Tarot was not the only part of this process — it honestly was not any part of my decision-making, even if I was still diligently recording the cards in my planner and observing how different they were from the previous summer and how the same theme repeated week after week. As I researched each card many times over, I could look at different aspects of myself, the roles I play in work or social relationships, and, more often than not, be reminded to manage my inner critic. It was always pertinent advice, in other words, but I didn’t ever come storming into a room telling my partner that I was going to quit my job ‘because the cards told me to.’

I did, however, reconnect with the idea of serendipity. My therapy sessions often turned up something that left me stunned. I’d discuss some aspects of my revelation with my partner, sister, or best friend. I’d write in my journal about these greater concepts and connections that landed hard on my heart. The next day, I would draw my cards and see some of the same phrases used by my therapist appearing in the reference materials. Things I’d never thought about were there in front of me the whole time, waiting to be discovered. 

My Current Practice

Tarot has surprised me more than anything else in my life. I had previously considered it a “fortune-telling” practice equivalent to “Call Miss Cleo now!” (If you remember that!) But I had months of spreads where I had very carefully recorded the card meanings by keywords, cross-checking with various references and keeping my personal interpretations to a minimum. 

I went about this as skeptically as you can imagine. I made sure to shuffle over and over to avoid finding cards in the same place. I inspected cards for tiny flaws that may make them pop out of the deck more than their neighbors. I drew with my eyes closed to ensure minute variations in the printing didn’t influence my choices. I didn’t allow my natural clumsiness to change my process; if I dropped a card during a shuffle, that one went back into the deck to be shuffled even longer than before. (Some people may enjoy those surprise bonus cards, but for me, I drop things so often it does not feel like anything special.)

I had pages in my journal where I had written about my struggles and feelings of disconnection from my career before I drew cards and found some of those exact phrases repeated back to me in a book. I began talking through these moments with my closest friends, and every time I attempted to present things logically: here’s what I said to my therapist yesterday, here’s what I wrote in my journal, here’s what I drew, here are 3 sources that have different approaches for cards x, y, and z, but for this card, they all agree on this same thing…

Yeah, I was definitely skeptical. I needed to pile up the evidence before I could admit that I was really getting something from this practice. I don’t know how or why it works, and I don’t know if it is something about me, specifically. I don’t know if any random person who went through the exercises that I did would notice patterns as I have. I’ve reached the level of familiarity with the cards that I can now draw for people I don’t know and explain the story I see of those cards, and honestly, the reaction I have gotten from these people has floored me.

I don’t have a deep well of self-confidence, and I never have. (One of many things I am working on!) When I draw cards for people, part of me expects they will laugh and say, That makes no sense. But… it never happens. They stare at the cards, and I grow nervous enough to think I’m rambling; when I stop, they look at me wide-eyed and say things like, Wow, that reminds me of this exact situation I’m in, where… 

It’s been… honestly? I don’t know. Magical? As someone who loves to write, I know words like ‘magic’ have connotations based on the reader’s personal experiences and perspective. People who have only ever heard of Tarot as a gimmicky scam, like I had, will register a very different facial expression if I offer to read their cards than someone who is charging moon water and writing words of power on the bay leaves they add to their spaghetti sauce. (Use food-safe ink if you do that!) People who only knew me as the software engineer may think this is all quite odd and that I’ve gone off my rocker. You could say things like a mid-life crisis, although mid-30s is usually a little young for that stereotype.

Final Thoughts

After living through this, I would encourage everyone to examine their inner beliefs and question their origins.

Of course, if you had a family member who made a series of unhealthy life choices and blamed it on the horoscope they read in the newspaper, you’ll have a different and understandable bias than someone else. There may be painful experiences that have left you unable to look at Tarot with the same curiosity that I did. That’s okay.

I would propose that if you slow down and step outside of your daily routines, changing your perspective even slightly,  you may find odd coincidences in other areas, moments where you may want to pause and reflect on something. Take those moments, even briefly, if you can. Don’t rush out to a casino if you see the same number a couple of times (or at least don’t blame me alone for that idea!) but allow yourself to be curious about that number, what it means to someone else, or maybe just falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole of reading about the origin of our numerical system! 

Any opportunity to learn something is valuable. We often stop seeking knowledge when not assigned it through school or work requirements. Life keeps us busy and easily drains our energy, especially as we grow older and have more responsibilities. I’m not telling you to read Tarot, but I’m suggesting that there are benefits in questioning our long-held beliefs and in researching subjects we’d never looked at before.

There will be more entries about Tarot ahead, but also entries about my ADHD and how allowing ‘spirituality’ into my vernacular has helped me manage myself with more kindness. If you’d like to engage with me in conversations about Tarot, consider checking out my Instagram, where I’ve been posting my daily spreads, or following my FB page, where group conversations are more easily managed. And if you’re curious about it, my ko-fi will have information where you can book a Tarot reading with me!