My first foray into tarot cards was on the hardwood floors in the shared bedroom of my public boarding school. I remember wrestling with more difficult ideas of identity and sexuality and turning to the cards for some kind of security, reaching out to the cards in an attempt to grapple with myself at the funny and tender age of fifteen.

I’m not sure who exactly owned the cards, but I recall being absolutely horrified at the outcome that lay out in my first ever Celtic cross.

I didn’t touch another deck of tarot cards for a long time after that, but thought about them often. I always found spirituality endlessly curious, and the concept of benign little cardboard cards being chosen and ordered to predict my future scared, delighted and fascinated me.

If I told you my re-entry into tarot cards was bordering obsessive, it could be an understatement. After getting a two card reading done at a Halloween party that more or less predicted my untimely parenthood (of the family dog), I began doing my own readings.

Two card, five card, Celtic cross, some home brew arrangements, I was absolutely hooked. I would sometimes do five or six readings in a sitting, and would do a sitting nearly every day for about four months. I would get home from a night out at three in the morning and do a spread before bed.

I would wake up and do a quick two card before breakfast. I would try (often with no real success) to get my friends to let me do a reading for them. I thought about the cards nearly constantly.

Looking back at this deep dive into spirituality and tarot cards with compassionate eyes on myself, it was during a time where I was very obviously struggling to maintain a sense of control. The internal struggle with identity, changing relationships, even grief lead to finding immense comfort in the shuffling of the deck, the careful pulling of cards.

I don’t think the point of tarot for me is whether the cards were true or not, the point was feeling like I had any sort of jurisdiction over my own existence.

I see my relationship with tarot as a microcosm of human spirituality in its entirety, and the relationship helped me to look at ideas of spirituality and religion with a more empathetic eye. If pulling out some little pieces of cardboard with pretty little pictures on it helps you to feel less like you’re spinning out of control, I think that’s a magical event within itself.

As for me, my deck sits nestled into the back of my book shelf for now. I’ve been feeling much more at ease and haven’t touched the cards in months, nearly a year. I don’t need the control right now, the present is beautiful enough that I don’t need the future... but if the time comes I know they’re always there for me.