Okay, so I kept seeing these tarot cards around. Friends had them, saw them in shops. Looked kinda interesting, you know? Always seemed a bit mysterious, and I got curious about what the deal was.
Decided to just grab one eventually. I went into this little shop downtown, the kind that smells like incense. They had rows and rows of decks. Honestly, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. So many different styles and pictures. I just ended up picking one where the artwork caught my eye, seemed less complicated than some of the others. Simple as that, really.
Got it home, opened up the box. A big stack of cards, nice quality, pretty pictures and all that. It came with this tiny little booklet, folded up real small. This was supposed to tell you what all the cards meant.
So I tried following the instructions in the booklet. Said to shuffle the cards, think of a question, then lay them out in some pattern they showed. I think it was called a ‘spread’ or something. Anyway, I did that. Pulled a few cards and laid them face up.
Then I looked at the cards I pulled, and I looked back at the descriptions in that tiny booklet. Honestly? It didn’t make a whole lot of sense at first. The descriptions were super vague, felt like they could mean pretty much anything you wanted them to mean. I kinda felt silly, just sitting there staring at these pictures and trying to connect them to my life based on a couple of short sentences in a tiny book.
I didn’t go out and buy a ton of big, heavy books on the subject or sign up for any online classes or anything like that. Seemed like a lot of work and maybe not really my thing. I just kept the deck on my shelf. I’d mess with it now and then, maybe when I was bored or just wanted something different to do with my hands.
Sometimes I’d just shuffle them and pull one card, just to look at the picture. After a while, I stopped worrying so much about the ‘official’ meanings in that little book. I’d just look at the images, you know? See what thoughts or feelings popped into my head when I looked at them. It became less about trying to be some kind of fortune teller and more about just… observing.
Ended up picking up another deck later on, found one cheap at a used bookstore. This one had a totally different art style, much simpler. I wanted to see if it felt any different to use.
- Found that I definitely liked some artwork styles more than others.
- Some decks, the pictures just felt easier to look at, easier to get a quick impression from.
- Others I saw later seemed too busy, too many symbols crammed in, just made my eyes glaze over.
So yeah, it turned out the actual deck itself made a difference, at least for me. Finding pictures I could actually connect with visually was key.
So where am I at with them now? I don’t use them every day or for big life decisions or anything dramatic like that. Definitely not trying to predict the future. It’s more like… sometimes if I’m feeling a bit stuck on a problem, or just mulling something over, I might pull a card or two.
I just look at the picture. See what thought it sparks, what angle it suggests. It’s almost like a weird little creativity prompt, gives my brain something different to chew on for a minute. It ended up becoming more of a personal thinking tool for me, a way to look at things from a different perspective, rather than some mystical oracle thing. Just my practical experience with it, anyway.
