I TRADED MY THERAPIST FOR A TAROT READER
I’ve been sitting on this personal essay since 2017. I’ve come back to it on and off, but I think I needed a certain amount of distance from the situation to figure out its ending and impact in my life. Originally, it was meant to be a story about how I discovered tarot and used it while taking a break from traditional therapy. In reality, it’s a story about how I used tarot to regulate my anxiety around a very anxiety-inducing “relationship” that led me to a personal rock bottom. I was suffering from what my current therapist has referred to as romantic obsession—it’s not a clinical diagnosis, but many books have been written on the topic.
Have you ever been ghosted or rejected by someone to then find yourself unable to think about anything but that person? Replay all your conversations and every interaction? Walk by the places you once went together or around their neighborhood hoping to bump into them? Find yourself thinking, if I could only just see them one more time. Check their Instagram or Instagram Stories several times a day? Find any chance to bring them up to your friends?
There is a certain allure to unsatisfied desire as hard as it might be to own up to it.
“In the month of June, you’re going to get into a fight, a verbal fight with somebody…while traveling,” my tarot reader told me as I sat at his table inside a Lower East Side crystal shop in May of 2016.
There was a slight knot in my stomach, a mix of anticipation and excitement as he flipped a new card over. I was holding back any words as he continued. “Six of swords, moving across water. Libra is about partnerships,” he flipped over a set of three cards, one by one. I rarely got into fights, so this was definitely an unusual prediction for me.
But which trip exactly was he talking about? I had just come back from a weekend away with my family, where an argument or two had definitely gone down. I had two more trips for the month lined up, plus one for the following month I was still waiting to confirm.
“Well, there’s a chance the Cancer and I might travel together in June,” I finally revealed to him. My tarot reader and I didn’t talk names, just astrological signs.
“Oh nowww that makes sense,” he exaggerated his words. “I don’t know. They’re saying you should go by yourself. You’ll have more fun without him.”
That was definitely not what I was hoping to hear.
“If you don’t have verbal clarity with him, it wouldn’t be a good idea.”
Of course I didn’t have verbal clarity—I was involved with someone who was the textbook definition of emotionally unavailable.
It was just four months earlier that I had met my tarot reader. I was shopping with a friend when we stopped at a crystal store I had walked by thousands of times before. Inside it smelled like burning palo santo–don’t they all? There were displays of incense, candles for love, wisdom, hope, serenity, bundles of sage, books on dreams, tarot, and astrology. While browsing inside, the owner alerted us that they had a tarot reader available. $25 for 15 minutes. Why not? It was my first tarot reading, and I was hooked afterward.
I came to trust my tarot reader with my deepest secrets, a level of trust that I previously only shared with my therapist of five years. I had just broken up with my therapist though. The therapy training wheels had only been off for a few weeks before this spiritual advisor morphed into a new kind of therapy for me. He offered a level of validation and insight that you simply can’t get with traditional talk therapy.
He calmed me down when I was upset about my botched 30th birthday trip with my family, encouraged me to pursue the things that made me happy, pushed me to think deeply about my life’s purpose, and assured me that I would find a great new apartment, which I did, and signed my lease by the exact date he foresaw. But when it came to an anxiety-inducing relationship, that’s where I found the most solace in tarot.
Many say ignorance is bliss, but for a long time, I was not one of those people. I wanted to know everything, and I mean everything. Now I realize that that was just a function of my anxiety and desire for control of the unknown. It’s impossible to know everything and have constant control. But if tarot could offer a peek into the unknown—what’s a better use than getting into the mind of a guy whom you’re never quite sure where things stand?
