If you’d to listen to me read this post, you can click the play button above!

PS: Initiation #1 for the Not So Secret Tarot Society is this Wednesday. There is more info at the end of this newsletter. I’d love for you to join! Membership closes at the end of September.

Last week, my body quietly hummed along to a rhythm I haven’t felt in years.

I was doing the things. My days were productive. I checked boxes off one by one.

• Breakfast.

• Work.

• Clean kitchen.

• Lunch.

• Clean kitchen.

• Wash laundry.

• Fold laundry.

• Work.

• Feed dogs.

• Prep dinner.

• Cook dinner.

• Eat dinner.

• Clean kitchen.

• Bed.

I couldn’t tell you how I felt. I could, however, tell you what I was thinking:

Maybe you’re just not someone who gets the relationship or the partner.

We can’t all have everything.

Some things just aren’t meant for certain people.

This just isn’t meant for you.

That can be okay.

What struck me wasn’t the content of these thoughts, but the sheer conviction and calm attached to them. It was distant, yet incredibly familiar.

Somewhere, somehow these deep rooted beliefs, so strong they felt like capital T truth, had been activated and along with them the eldest daughter, hyper independent, productivity, everything is under control switch flipped.

This state brought with it a strange low-grade comfort.

I had pulled up my hood, allowing it to function as blinders to possibility and plugged along, shoulders hunched forward; my upper back a rubber band ready to snap.

I was the Hermit.

A wise, solitary, being who puts one foot in front of the other. One who people often turn to for help navigating, but seldom offer to take a turn holding the lantern.

Recently, someone asked me to share my favorite tarot card. The Hermit, I answered reflexively and almost as quickly retracted.

My relationship to this card and this part of me is complicated. My intellect knows my auto-pilot, productivity and isolating thoughts are just a self-protective state. One that was my primary way of being for longer than it hasn’t been.

It kept me safe, kept me moving.

However, I’ve worked incredibly hard to stop letting it run my life. To orient myself toward self-acceptance, self-worth and connection.

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So as my therapist offered a suggestion, “Maybe you just let this run its course a bit. There isn’t anything to fix here.” There was a part of me that wanted to scream GET FUCKED, even if I knew from experience this was the path I needed to take, and another deluge of thoughts followed:

I have to do something or I’ll be here forever.

I can challenge each thought one by one, until this goes away. Watch me.

This is just a pity party.

These were also familiar. It was another part of me creating a ruckus that hadn’t shown up to the party in a long time.

In retrospect, my tarot cards and subconscious tried to alert me to this upcoming event two weeks before the thoughts arrived and my behavior shifted.

This is the sneaky benefit of using my cards face up. I flip through them. Look at the imagery, and select one based on where my attention lingers. Projection at its finest.

The last time I touched my deck and made art, guess what card I picked?

The Hermit.

At this point, it was clear to me, that working harder and fighting myself, was going to be the thing that kept me stuck, not allowing this state to run its course. So, instead of banishing the Hermit part of me from the deck, I decided to put myself in his cloak.

I pulled out my Hermit card and let my eyes linger on the image.

It created just enough distance that I could make contact with my internal state, with curiosity and compassion that were previously inaccessible.

I stepped into the scene.

What did the Hermit want? He wanted someone to walk up behind him, place their hands gently on his shoulders, and says quietly, “come sit with me for a bit”.

He would follow.

Sit.

Remove his hood.

Unzip his cloak.

Lay down.

Place his head in her lap.

Book in one hand, the other on his chest, she would read to him quietly until he fell asleep. Then wiggle out gently, and clean up the kitchen so he wouldn’t need to do it in the morning.

Lost in the daydream of the card, I felt something subtle shift within me. My imagination, offering me the care and comfort I so desperately craved.

And as I opened my eyes, a returning flicker of hope arrived, that maybe this would be possible for me someday too.

After writing this post, I went back through the art I’ve made with the Hermit card over the course of the last year, and I can so clearly what I wrote in this newsletter reflected in those pieces. I’ve shared some of the images throughout this post. It has me thinking about putting them all together and making a little book. I think the Hermit and I are entering a new chapter….

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Here is the TLDR on the Not So Secret Tarot Society.

Who/What? a group of curious, kind, multi-passionate humans using tarot to play, project and connect.

Why? Tarot attracts cool people, the kind who go from depth psychology, to land healing, to Ted Lasso, to deconstructing religion, to the cool bird they just saw outside, and back again, all in the same ten minutes. THE PROBLEM…sometimes we have trouble finding each other because we are so all over the place.

When? September 2026 - January 2027 (the downfall of any society is thinking it’s permanent)

Members Get:

• An “Initiation”

• Access to Monthly Meetings: 1hr Zoom sessions, themed by tarot suit (Intellect/Emotions/Behavior/Energy), guaranteed 1+/month

• 4 mailed co-created zines: member intros + reflections from meetings

• Secret digital directory: members share how/when/about what they want to be contacted.

• Cost: $350 in total. You can either in full or pay $175 at sign up and $35/month Sept-January

LEARN MORE

If you want to indulge, you can listen to me read this post (mistakes and all) by listening to the voiceover.

_{I’m sharing the story below, because of the stories people have shared in miniature as they’ve added themselves to the interest list for the Not So Secret Tarot Society. I had grand plans of writing back to everyone personally along with an invite to join, but once again I’ve been reminded by my body that I am only one human. I hope by sharing a bit of the story that led me to launch the NSSTS in the first place, it will match some of the openness in those messages. And if you do decide to join this fall, there will be plenty of space for us to connect the way my heart really wants, intentionally, with presence and a heaping scoop of whimsy.}

_{Instead of counting on hustle, I’m counting on trust. Trust the NSSTS will find its way to where it needs to go, and the people who it is for will find their way to it. If you are on the list and waiting on an email from me, you will probably get one soon, you can also click here for the details.}

_{But for now, let me tell you how I got here….}

_{TW: there is some mention of suicidal ideation.}

Last summer I fell in love for the first time and I cut up my tarot cards. The thing both had in common: my own deconstruction.

January 2025

I drove my dead mom’s Jeep Wrangler, 4 hours to Western Massachusetts with weak heat blowing. I was attempting to go on a retreat. I say attempting because, while I physically made it, I actually retreated two days in. The brief change of scenery caused the reality of all I’d been holding and all I’d lost (a brother, both parents, my career, just to name a few) to come crashing in.

After I fled home, the New England winter continued to midwife this excruciating experience and by April, I was exhausted. The kind that leaves you with two choices: die or roll over and write an exasperated letter to Mary Oliver:

April 1, 2025

Dear Mary,

You knew darkness. Did it sneak up on you, or did you feel it coming? Did you ever get used to it? How did you find love? How did you find comfort? There’s a chunk of my soul somewhere buried that tries to tell me that I can do without it, that keeps me small.

It doesn’t do this loudly or aggressively. It’s so subtle, so reflexive that it’s in the room before I can catch it. I feel so broken again. I’ve tried so hard to love this life. I’ve tried so hard to open myself, to soften, to slow down, to let all the beautiful things into my field of vision.

And yet somehow I find myself here again, inhabiting a body riddled with stress, a heart that’s broken and quite frankly feels tortured.

Why is this the path I have to walk? There’s too much pain. Why am I the one that lived? That no matter how deeply hurt I am, I just can’t get myself to die.

Mary didn’t answer, but like it did for her, the budding oak outside my bedroom window did and it saved me.

Over the next few days, spring continued to appear, and so did I.

The cracking open allowed light to shine on something that was simultaneously so buried I had no clue it was there, and so barely buried I knew all along. My queerness.

For my whole life I’d battled internally, am I gay or straight? But what I didn’t realize was that there could be an option C. What if I didn’t have to choose? What if I didn’t have to let sex be the organizing principle?

And with this, suddenly, I felt my world and body expand in a way that I had never had before.

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This may seem odd coming from someone whose public-facing work is drenched in tarot, and who has the Star inked on one arm and the funny fish from the Page of Cups on the other,

but I don’t pull tarot cards every day instead, most days I pull an oracle card when my dogs are eating their breakfast, and that’s it. There’s no journaling, nothing fancy. Some days I think nothing of it again. Others I see it on my nightstand before my head hits the pillow and think, well, “that tracks”. But occasionally something funky happens, like it did that spring, a few days after I came out.

Freedom, freedom, freedom.

The same card appeared day after day. And so like Mary Oliver did, I started walking with the word and scribbling:

April 24, 2025

I’ve never loved anything enough to master it, to dedicate myself fully to it. I loved history, but not so much that I memorized dates fervently or devoured lengthy biographies. I liked it enough to go ankle deep, to find the parts that resonated, the stories, and to use them as touchstones. The same goes for the outdoors. I love birds, I love animals, I love nature, yet I don’t love it enough to become a biologist or an ornithologist. The same goes for human nature. A psychologist? No thanks. Sociologist? No.

On some level, this has made me unable to fit in. I’ve tried for a very long time, but I’m not one to put on a show. And it’s hard to find your people when you refuse to niche down or to become an expert, not just in a professional sense but in community as well.

This is the trouble with labels, isn’t it? From starting with a label on and then building upwards, for some of us, working this way means that the shoe will never quite fit.

And for me, maybe that can be okay. Maybe I don’t have to be any kind of one thing.

Maybe I’m here to dabble, to be someone who collects a lot of bits and bobs from everywhere and notices how they’re all connected, to help other people do the same.

Maybe this is what they talk about when they talk about belonging to yourself first.

Maybe this is what happens when your ties with the labels you once clung to, teacher, daughter, have been cut loose.

You’re left to rebuild, and you realize that you would rather construct 100 half-built things than have mastery over one.

This is what it looks like to let your heart lead, and it’s scary because the world isn’t built to be compatible with that.

This next part will seem fast, because it was. 16 days later, I downloaded a dating app, met someone, and instantly hit it off.

We spent long spacious days together that summer. There were moments when my whole body exhaled and collapsed into safety with another human for the first time.

I had the experience of feeling held and seen in ways I’d never had, and I hope, that in the very least, she had a moment or two of that experience as well.

With this newfound coherence, it became impossible to ignore all the other areas of my life where I’d limited myself.

By July, tarot found itself in my crosshairs. Well, actually, under my paper cutter. It was a quiet night. I was bored. My hands felt restless. I reached for my deck and started shuffling.

78 perfectly shaped fidgets, but my hands wanted more. They wanted to cut them. In the past, I would have stopped myself. Maggie, you can’t destroy this deck. You have no plan for what you’re going to do with it after you cut it. Maybe you should look on Pinterest first. What would other people think? You might regret this.

But with an awareness of what conforming had cost me, and a newfound trust in my body wisdom, I cut those fuckers up and never looked back.

Here I am a year later. Those sliced up cards helped capture the love of that summer, heal the heartbreak and keep me moving.

They’ve brought me to Canada, conversations with people on different continents and more belonging to myself than ever before.I’ve liberated my tarot practice and somehow keep liberating myself.

How? Because I decided to stop playing by the rules and I decided to allow not picking a lane to be my lane.

Tarot is a collection of 78 images that does the same. No one’s claimed it.

It’s endlessly iterative and generative, like me. I know there are more people out who also find themselves drawn to the cards. Have bought all the books, and have most of them sitting pristinely on a shelf while they play and quietly break rules alone.

And if any of this sounds like you, let’s start playing loudly together.

Here is the TLDR on the Not So Secret Tarot Society: You’ve heard of a rage room, smash some plates, get your anger out? Think of our meetings as a (safe) projection room. The concept is simple, each week we will: Pull a card, based on a prompt. Document our reaction to the card. Share what the experience was like, and what came up for us. Why? Because once your reaction is on paper in front of you, we can start noticing the threads connecting all of us. Dates: Sept-January

You get:

• An “Initation”

• Access to Monthly Meetings: 1hr Zoom sessions, themed by tarot suit (Intellect/Emotions/Behavior/Energy), guaranteed 1+/month

• 4 mailed co-created zines: member intros + reflections from meetings

• Secret digital directory: members share how/when/about what they want to be contacted.

• Cost: $350 in total. You can either in full or pay $175 at sign up and $35/month Sept-January

LEARN MORE

When’s the last time you talked to someone, found out they were into tarot, and the conversation stayed about tarot for longer than ten minutes?

In my experience… never.

Why? Tarot attracts fascinating, box-defying humans, and I think that’s because tarot doesn’t belong to any one group or any one tradition.

These are the people who can go from depth psychology, to ecology and land healing, to Ted Lasso, to deconstructing religion, to the cool bird they saw outside, to Noah Kahan, to Neil the Seal, and back again, all within 10 minutes.

I am one of these people, and you know what I crave more than anything?

CONNECTION. WITH MORE PEOPLE LIKE THIS. ENTER THE PROBLEM.

The way the world works, in order to find connection we must:

1. Pick a door (AKA a hobby). That’s right, A SINGULAR HOBBY (the terror).

2. Show up and play a role (in the tarot world, teacher/student or reader/seeker)

3. Sit there all fucking awkwardly and wonder:

   • How many times we need to show our faces in order for natural connections to start to emerge

   • How soon is too soon to slide into someone’s DMs and ask if you can be friends

   • If this is one of those times where it would be weird to want to be friends with your teacher

This is the same dilemma that results in almost signing up for a pottery class EVERY FUCKING WINTER and ends with me screaming, “I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO GO MAKE A POT TO TRY AND MAKE FRIENDS.” And frankly, I’m not so sure I’m looking for 9,456 new friends, but what I DO want is to feel woven into something.

To belong to a web I can drop in and out without being penalized for it, getting raging FOMO or returning to a bunch of strangers.

Something that’s low-demand but not low-substance, because I connect through slow, deliberate presence, not noise (that’s why I’d rather go out to eat at 5:00 with all the old people instead of yelling over the band).

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So last Sunday, after years of turning these struggles over and over in my mind, both professionally and personally, I walked in from the beach, grabbed my Sharpie, and decided to DO THE FUCKING THING.

What is the FUCKING THING?

I soft-launched: THE NOT SO SECRET TAROT SOCIETY on Instagram.

And then promptly shit my pants (metaphorically) over the incredible response of over 200 people who put themselves on the list to learn more.

The thing that ISN’T SUCH A SECRET about the NSSTS is that it isn’t actually about learning, reading, or mastering tarot.

Instead, I am tapping into what I think is one of tarot’s most underutilized aspects, its connective power, and using it as a lure to bring together interesting people.

Why? Tarot attracts fascinating people who often don’t fit into a “normal” box, and often the only way we can find each other is by signing up for a class or reading, which defaults people to playing the roles of teacher or student, reader or seeker. I think that’s silly and unnecessary.

So, let’s stop pretending, get together, and use the cards as our safety blanket to connect.

Maggie

JOIN THE WAITLIST

The NSSTS is a temporary society for up to 44 curious, kind, multi-passionate humans who want to use tarot as an excuse to connect with one another.

BEGINS: SEPTEMBER 2026

ENDS: JANUARY 2027

(the downfall of any society is thinking it is permanent)

(also there’s a lot of info below, because transparency > secrets)

more stuff:

» 3 Ways to Use Tarot to Get the F*ck Out of Your Head

» follow along on instagram

other posts:

What do you want?

I’ve never understood how people can clearly articulate an answer to that question on the spot.

Whether someone (or a journal) is asking me what I want for dinner, or in the big lofty arm-wavy way…

wHaT dO yOu WaNt

there’s always a moment where I internally scream, I DON’T FUCKING KNOW, HELEN.

[Sorry for yelling Helen, whomever you are. That’s probably me bastardizing some pop culture reference that got absorbed into my psyche. Know the source? LEMME KNOW]

The thing is, I do often know what I want, but it’s hard to access or articulate.

In lighter stakes moments, I can tell you that I want tacos not Thai pretty quickly, but with the grandiose version, it’s still a bit inaccessible without some help.

But, don’t you worry (I know you’re an empath)…

I’ve found a WEIRD LITTLE SIDE DOOR that makes this question way more approachable…

TRYING HARDER….just kidding…..

AI….also kidding……

TAROT. DUH.

Only I’m not asking the cards to tell me, I’m using them to HACK me. And what did I want? MORE CHOICE.

Here is how I got there I used:

Prompt: If I were….

The fool, I’d buy a really tricked-out camper van and hit the road with no timeline for coming back. I’d want to see the country’s largest pieces of whimsy located 5 miles off long highways and wash them down with a diner snack that tastes like a well-loved flat top. You know the kind. My soul would be refueled by ancient trees and valleys taunting me with death. I’d make it 4 weeks before I’d toss it in reverse and head home towards the sea, toward all the things that actually make me me.

What makes me me? I’m not so sure, but I know what I’m not….

I INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM FOR A BRIEF ANNOUNCEMENT:

Sick of your thoughts? Get the messy marked up version of MINE.

See how I got clarity + steps to do it yourself + why this works.

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BACK TO OUR FEATURED PROGRAMMING…

And maybe that’s my foolish fantasy that only goes so far. It’s not that looking at the world’s largest ball of yarn and national parks aren’t me. Whimsy, novelty, interconnectedness, and nature very much are. But maybe the thing I’m not is the person who heads away from their home, their neighbors, their relationships with no firm plan of when I’ll return. A one-way ticket isn’t for me. But it’s interesting my mind went there.

I think that this has more to do with the fact that I’ve never had the ability or resources to simply drop it all. And so there is this history of not getting to have had the freedom to explore the world or myself with reckless abandon, and I just want that choice. I guess this is where I do have some reconciling to do though, because I could very conceivably wake up tomorrow, put my home on the market, and go. But I don’t want that either.

So here I am between the two points of friction: the fantasy of the Fool on one end and repression and responsibility on the other. And I am realizing that perhaps the work of the Fool today was to ping-pong me between both of them and remind me that I actually do have choice, and I’ll always use it to buy my return home.

Maybe I need to start recognize the moments where I do get to choose within every day.

Maggie

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» 3 Ways to Use Tarot to Get the F*ck Out of Your Head

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Things I’ve been thinking about (that I almost asked my cards about):

How I need to make more money. How I want to do it on my own terms.

How I’m sitting here with an audience I could probably just sell AI tarot card prompts to. How I’d rather max out a credit card (or few) before I do that.

How that’s probably stupid. How I should just be able to create something.

How I should just be able to create an offer then sell it. People do it all day long.

How maybe I’m just in my own way. How maybe I’m not trying hard enough.

How packaging and selling something feels like I need to do the very thing I’ve worked so hard to move away from….putting myself in a box.

Pick a lane. Tarot reader. Tarot teacher. Tarot at all.

None of these fit. My body rejects them. My mind continues to try them on for size. Like the pair of pants you keep in the back of your closet for years, just in case.

I’m a dabbler. I’m a spiritual generalist. An amalgam of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And often that’s as specific as I can get, because I care more about how something feels, not what it’s called.

I want to connect with people who relate.

Who follow witches, psychologists, tarot readers, artists, psychics, yoga teachers, etc. yet they don’t have a desire to or feel like they can fully claim any of those labels.

Who have bookshelves filled with poetry, a half finished copy of the Artist’s way, kid’s coloring books, spell books, workbooks their therapist told them to order, tarot guides.

Who take a little from here, a little from there and build their own thing or want to.

But how do you sell that? And what do you sell?

For weeks now, I’ve had an impulse while brushing my teeth, unloading the dishwasher, driving, all those moments where my phone is out of reach long enough to let something true sneak in…..that what I need to do is stop trying to create in a silo.

To get of my head. To ask the people on the other end what they would pay for.

WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT WITHOUT EVEN HAVING SOLID CHOICES TO OFFER?! My inner critic screams. PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WANT OR NEED. THAT’S THE WHOLE THING. YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FIND THE GAP IN THE MARKET, MAKE THE THING AND TELL THEM WHY THEY NEED IT.

And ‘round and ‘round I go. But to let my inner critic win means letting fear win and I only allow that to happen 10-25 times a week now (That’s a joke. I have better things to do than count. That is not a joke.)

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I believe in the right conditions we can all identify what we want and need and that in today’s world to sit here and tell people what they should spend their money on is unethical. Especially when so many of us are barely getting by.

And so here I am, about to do the thing the brain gremlin is warning me against….

Not picking a lane. Not pitching an offer. Not telling people what they need or want.

But instead sharing and asking. Sharing that I need more income. Sharing what I have to offer and asking.

Asking what you need. Asking what you would trade money for. And so like anything I do that I share here, I’ll go first…..

What DON’T you need more of? .

I don’t need more classes.

I don’t need more community events where I awkwardly pretend to be comfortable doing rituals with other people when really I’m focused on how loud the person next to me is breathing.

I don’t need more how-to books.

What DO you need more of?

In the past, I needed permission. Permission to not use spreads. Permission to say fuck guide books and reversals. Permission to not have the cards memorized. Permission to not say namaste out loud or to mediate with my eyes open.

Now, I need something more like witnessing.

Not witnessing in the sense of something watching me DO something, but more like connecting with people where I can share the weird shit I’m doing with my tarot cards or the books I’ve started and hated. Or my favorite brand of incense. Or the the moments I’m still terrified that I’m doing all sorts of appropriation. To share what’s worked, what hasn’t. What’s poked at shame. What’s filled me with pride.

Your turn?

What DON’T you need more of? .

What DO you need more of? (Feeling words welcome)

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» 3 Ways to Use Tarot to Get the F*ck Out of Your Head

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I feel first, and often lack the words to accurately describe what I’m experiencing on the inside.

As someone who loves precision and words, the limits of language can be infuriating and, depending on the circumstance, heartbreaking. It’s led to being misunderstood, and the meaning of my words evaporating into the chasm of translation.

For months I’ve been fighting myself, declaring this another self-improvement project I must conquer. The fear ignited by recent relational experiences and a brief internet confrontation told me if I don’t fix the very act of opening my mouth, I’ll be a liability to myself and others. I’ll get hurt. I’ll hurt people. I’ll be misunderstood.

For the most part, I didn’t allow fear to fully take the wheel, but the residue of these experiences has been hard to shake. These are old wounds.

Then, sitting under the full moon last night, something shifted. Clarity arrived, the kind that flows both ways, through mind and body.

The right people will see the mess and not lose sight of the heart underneath it. The relationships I want in my life are ones that don’t require me to speak only with clarity and precision for the sake of avoiding someone else’s discomfort.

My words, raw or refined, carry equal worth. The way I speak to myself matters just as much as the words that leave my hand or my mouth.

Language holds both the keys to liberation and to oppression.

Words carry power, and I will never stop being fascinated by the mysteries tucked inside and around them.

This clarity wasn’t only born from standing at the crossroads of self-monitoring and self-abandonment.

It also came, fittingly, through a conversation, and an article someone shared with me:

The Gaelic Effect: How the Irish language can save the world

Don't Should on Me

“When you speak in Irish, every word is a tiny poem that reveals a new perspective.” — Hector Ó hEochagáin…

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a year ago · 49 likes · 36 comments

The article explores how there is no word for “should” in the Irish language. As I read how they tied this in with explorations of Nonviolent Communication and power over and power with, I felt my whole body light up. Clarity arrived again, followed by courage.

So this morning, sitting with my tarot cards and this newfound conviction, I sat with this phrase:

Ask my tarot cards a question.

I’ve written before about power and tarot, but never about this specific phrase. When I hear it, my body tingles — not in the Dr. Bronner’s peppermint-soap kind of way, but in the something feels off here kind of way. It gives me the ick.

It leaves me feeling positioned as the seeker, and the cards, or something outside of me, as the answer. It screams power over.

Whenever I bump into that sensation, my next step is usually to run other words through my body, searching for ones that don’t make me curl forward but instead offer spaciousness.

This time, I landed on a few:

Ask my tarot cards to listen.
Ask my tarot cards to accompany.
Ask my cards to collaborate.

Each offers a bi-directional flow of energy, of power. Listening isn’t passive — it requires two parties exchanging information and attention. Accompanying is an act of companionship, of togetherness. Collaboration has give and take built into it.

Each of these fits my relationship with tarot and spirituality far better than “asking my tarot cards a question” ever did. None of them center me as the only source of information, or something outside me as capital-T Truth.

Questioning the language around spiritual practice is something I’ve done longer than I’ve realized. Its roots trace back to lost points and red marks on school papers for not capitalizing the T in Truth, or the G in God, until I was conditioned to do otherwise.

Maybe writing about all of this publicly is my way of honoring the younger part of me who listened to that authority, even when her body was screaming no.

—Maggie

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I glanced at my mom in the passenger seat of her black Jeep Wrangler, shriveled arm sticking out the window, sea breeze coursing between her fingers.

I wondered if it felt different when it was your last time at the beach.

Even if I had thought to ask, her answer would’ve been limited to whatever she was able to scrawl on her message board.

ALS claimed her voice months before.

We parked and I walked down to the shoreline and filled up a blue 5-gallon bucket with saltwater and sand. I placed it in front of my mom and gently lowered her legs inside, watching her toes curl around the granules of sand.

As the sun beat down she leaned forward, removed her hat and splashed water on her paper-thin face.

She died 5 days later.

It will be 4 years next month.

Today, I watched the sun glisten over the water, waves lapping at my ankles. A woman walked by and we exchanged words of gratitude for having access to such beauty.

I headed back to my chair and sat. The breeze felt cool on my bare arms.

Within minutes, the once crisp view shifted slightly out of focus, the once dazzling colors dulling.

My mind knew it was 2026, but my exposed skin, the once gorgeous input filtering in through all my senses pulled my body back and memories of that last day at the beach with my mom came galloping in.

I breathed slowly as I watched the woman disappear along the shoreline, wondering if I was the only one sitting in the sun thinking of death.

Some days the Sun comforts, others it assaults.

-Maggie

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Last week I was accused of plagiarism.

I can find the humor now that there’s a post on Instagram with my face plastered on it, the way someone who tries to cash a bad check at a grocery store is displayed.

I made a reel stating that no one is talking the challenges of memorizing tarot for some neurodivergent brains and the implications the lack of representation and resources had for me and in a broader sense. I can understand why the person who accused me felt hurt. They had made a Zine on the topic and stolen from because I had liked their post a few weeks prior.

While I can own the harm my rhetoric caused, I still stand by it. It was an intentional choice made because I felt shedding light on the issue was worth the risk. Where I drew the line however, was conceding to their accusation of theft and agreeing with their assessment that their work had directly inspired mine, because it simply wasn’t true.

What actually spurred my urge to name neurodivergence and tarot loudly, in addition to my own lived experience, was another internet conversation a few days prior.

It was a lazy Saturday morning scrolling Threads when I stumbled upon this:

As I scrolled through the usual advice, learn something else to help you remember (the elements, numerology, astrology) and just USE YOUR INTUITION, I came across this comment:

And being who I am, and what I’m passionate about, I wasn’t going to let that one slip by. What resulted ended up being genuinely good dialogue with some common ground found (and my own neurodivergence diagnosed in the comments…for the record I currently will claim ADHD and Giftedness), but both these interactions left me even more rooted in my why for making this content and I’m doing this work at all.

It’s not that I don’t believe in ethics or standards with tarot or in life, or that there aren’t matters of right and wrong.

It’s more that these subtle, often unintentional stakes of ownership and authority, who’s a real reader, who gets to claim what, what types of practices are legitimate, have quietly accumulated into something that causes real harm in the tarot world and beyond it. To real people. To me.

As a recently out queer person, I have a particularly acute sensitivity to this. It took 35 years and both parents dying for me to see and step into who I am because I had existed inside systems that implicitly and often explicitly said that my way of being was wrong. So do I have a bit of a hairpin trigger at times? Yes, and frankly, I’m a bit unapologetic about it at this point. This work is important.

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And yet, even being as rooted as I am in my values, the aftershocks of both these interactions left me questioning whether I was qualified to be making public content about tarot at all.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe I don’t know enough. Maybe I need to research more, memorize more, do more. The imposter was loud. She’s since been dialed down to volume 3. But it took deliberately slowing down, stepping back from posting, some raging with friends and sitting with what I actually know to be true about myself and my work.

Here’s the thing: my content may look tarot-first, but…it’s not. Tarot is my trench coat and there are lots of monkeys inside.

My social media feeds, my bookshelf, my insides are filled more with philosophy, psychology, personal development, creativity and art than they are with tarot. Those are my monkeys and tarot is the vehicle that helps me deliver and make visible my other passions. But that’s uncomfortable, because like in most areas of my life, I’m just slightly outside the margins.

I recently did an interview on a tarot podcast, and because my brain is what it is, I listened back to it at least three times out of discomfort (don’t tell my therapist). Why? Because the host said during the opening that even if you’d never touched a tarot card, there was something in this conversation for you. And in that, I felt genuinely seen and also a little unmoored. Because there I was, on a tarot podcast, and most of it had nothing to do with tarot. Maybe I don’t belong in this space. Maybe I am an imposter. Maybe it is wrong for me to use tarot the way I am.

Because we live in an algorithmic world I get lumped into the box of tarot teacher or tarot reader. So when I’m speaking about neurodivergence and tarot, another creator thinks I’m on their turf, which, yes, there is shared ground, AND there’s also more nuance and perhaps less overlap than they may see at first glance. That’s where misunderstanding happens, and sometimes the very act of refusing to fit neatly inside a box also makes other people uncomfortable.

This is one of the challenges that comes with living in a body and owning a mind whose depth isn’t always legible to the outside world.

Occasionally, we need to grab onto something that doesn’t quite fit to in order to make ourselves visible. And in doing that, there will always come the chance of misunderstanding and awareness that we don’t quite fit. But I’ve learned that the alternative is more painful.

When I tried to strictly be a tarot teacher, it hurt. When I tried to strictly be a history teacher, it hurt. Life coach, hurt. I even contemplated going back to school for therapy, and thankfully for my sanity and bank account, by that point I had just enough self-knowledge to step off that track before it was too late.

I’m not meant to fit into a box, but sometimes finding my people requires temporarily sitting inside one.

The experience is a bit like climbing into a refrigerator box. Once I’m inside I then start looking around and making awkward eye contact with others who are uncomfortable being boxed in too. But the fun part is that almost inevitably each time, someone will pull some trinkets on the down-low and say, “hey, isn’t this box fucking boring and a little claustrophobic…” and then we start lovingly punching holes in the side of the damn thing.

So, if you’re interacting with my content, you can now consider yourself warned: I’m probably (and by that I AM) slipping vegetables into your system via the cards. About how you like to learn. About where someone made you question yourself. About what becomes possible when you allow yourself one more iota of trust, even if you’re kicking and screaming and terrified.

Maggie :)

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There’s a time in my life when I’d divert my gaze away from the naked body on the Star card.

Even as I write this, there’s an impulse to describe this diversion as something happening so subconsciously that I was unaware of it until recently and that would be a lie.

My mind and body are filled with moments when I was keenly aware that my internal world was out of step with the one around me, and not only was I different but the things I was experiencing were considered fundamentally wrong by the people and places I spent the most time with.

I’m writing as if I’m outside of this, as if it is something that no longer happens. That distancing is also a bit of a protective measure.

This still happens.

I still feel it.

Only now, instead of allowing the views of the outside world to be my organizing principle, I make room for my felt sense as an equal trusted source of information. One that deserves to be heard.

So today, as I notice the impulse to look away from the body on The Star, I carry an awareness that it’s the same shame that appeared as I stood in the girls locker room of my Catholic high school.

And compassion emerges for younger me whose inside world was so rich, so complex, she not only had difficulty expressing it, but was repeatedly told her way of being was wrong or she needed to make herself more acceptably legible in order to make others feel more comfortable.

And I do differently for her.

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When I look at the Star, I see someone who balances explorations into their own subconscious with an open, visible, and felt presence in the world.

They are intentional each time they bend forward to examine their self and do so in service of nourishment, integration, and the desire to take that wisdom and pay it forward.

Not from compulsion, shame, or a relentless pull to fix.

The figure on the Star is not broken.

It is beautifully human and whole.

So am I and so are you.

-Maggie

more stuff:

»my episode of confessions of a tarot reader dropped this week. listen on spotify, apple or buzzsprout.

»want 2 hours with cards and a non-spiraling human to help you sort out whatever the hell is on the inside? learn more.

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I couldn’t connect to my tarot cards.

I sat down, touched them, and felt absolutely nothing. No creativity. No curiosity. Nada. This hasn’t happened in a few months, so naturally….

CUE THE FUCKING SPIRAL.

AKA a rapid free-fall into anxiety ending with a bellyflop into the fundamental belief that I suck at this and probably everything else too.

“Where did my intuition go?”

“How can it be here and then gone again?”

“How long is it going to take to come back this time?”

Because it’s not my first rodeo with extra spicy brain gremlins, I had a hunch that….

MAYBE THERE’S A FEELING HERE?!?!?!

Truthfully, I’m someone who can feel an incredible amount on the inside, but I have a hard time putting words around whatever the hell it is.

The way I was absolutely internally assaulting myself made it clear that the problem wasn’t simply that I was unable to connect with my tarot cards, it’s that I was unable to connect with MYSELF (brain & body). The disconnect with the cards was a symptom of other things lurking around ,but while I had my finger on the pulse, I decided to do the only logical thing…..use my tarot cards to identify my feelings about being unable to connect with them.

TIME FOR SOME ALCHEMY!!!!!!!!

Not to do a reading. Not to see what the universe had to say about it. Not to problem solve, but to move into whatever the hell it was inside and see if I could put some words around it.

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I flipped through my cards face up and looked for the one that matched my insides. Not using my intellectualized understanding of what each card means, not keywords or symbolism…just my eyeballs.

I grabbed the 5 of Pentacles.

Brain gremlins, being gremlin-y naturally wanted to start diving into what does this card mean, what is this trying to tell me, but I kindly told them to STFU and focused on one thing: what do I SEE in this card? People outside a building. Wearing torn clothing. Snow. Which then became…Maybe there are warm bodies on the other side of that door and they don’t have access to that…This just looks lonely.

Because I’m a big brave baddie, I dug in a bit more and asked myself: what’s the connection between what I saw and whatever the hell it was inside?

OUCHHHHHHHH….

I was scared. I was worried that if I can’t find my way back to the cards, I’m going to lose the creative momentum I’ve been building and the community that’s started to form around it. I’ll be back at square one and I’m too fucking tired to be back at square one.

Fear is a core emotion. Clearly, the brain gremlins went to town trying to disconnect me from my body and therefore the fear. They deemed it too much to feel, but the cards and I were well on our way to dismantling their wall.

I went back to the deck, to find out what fear thought the solution looked like.

The 8 of Pentacles. What do I SEE in this card? A person with their head down. Making something. No one around. Hard work. Discipline. Focus. Grind.

Then I went back to the deck, this time on the hunt with my eyeballs for something that looked like the opposite of all of that. The Sun. What I saw: a naked smiling baby. a horse. plants. it looks playful. there’s ease. maybe joy.

Then I took both cards and laid them side by side.

I want to pause here for a second (don’t worry this won’t be a cliffhanger, but it is a slight important detour)…

When I first started using tarot, my impulse when I was struggling with something was to reach for the deck and then shuffle, pull, interpret, solve. Ask the cards what to do. Let them tell me what things meant.

But in this state? That would’ve been pouring gasoline on the brain gremlin’s bonfire.

More symbols to interpret, more meaning to assign, more ways to stay in my intellect, out of my body and trying to decode something external, instead of recognizing something internal. And honestly? For my brain, that’s not just true when I’m spiraling, or actually ever. Starting with a question, pulling a card, interpreting, was never really available to me. I just thought I was bad at tarot and beat myself up for years.

By learning to choose cards with my body (my eyes) and seeing where it leads, I can find clarity about whatever the hell is happening inside. The cards just help it become visible.

DETOUR OVER….

Lastly, I asked myself: which card am I more pulled toward right now? The Sun. That’s my answer. Not discipline, or trying harder. Play. The opposite of everything fear was pushing me toward.

My mind is still fighting me a bit on it, if i’m honest. It might take some time to simmer since this was only one swirl, but now I have something actionable to help me start heading in a more helpful direction.

I can also keep those two cards in my mind, keep checking in and asking which one am I more pulled toward right now?

BRAIN GREMLINS BE GONE.

more stuff:

»want to try this yourself? i scribbled you a cheat sheet.

»my episode of confessions of a tarot reader dropped this week. listen on spotify, apple or buzzsprout.

»want 2 hours with cards and a non-spiraling human to help you sort out whatever the hell is on the inside? learn more.

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I pulled the Strength card and then I accidentally slandered Mufasa.

Yesterday I made a post showing one of my favorite things to do with tarot cards. The method is basically free association.

You pull a card, write down the first five words that come to mind, no editing, no fact-checking, and then you look at what showed up and follow the thread.

I do this a lot on my own but honestly I think it’s even more fun in groups and the crew I did it with last weekend was amazing (I’m waving at you if you’re reading this. 333 for lifeeeeee).

My five words with the Strength card this time were:

DOG. APPLE. MUFASA. UNCOMFORTABLE. CHALLENGE.

And then when I started working with my five words, out came:

MUFASA WAS AN ASSHOLE.

My lovely followers were very quick to ask what my beef with him was.

AND I LOVED THIS.

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Because by every traditional measure, by the dictionary definition, they’re right. Scar WAS the villain.

And at first I was like, this is classic me. I suck at names. I’m also one of those people that thought J-Lo was singing, “are you Ellie?!”, in this 2000s classic, not spelling out Ja Rule’s last name until my friend absolutely blew my mind open and broke the news.

But then I stayed curious for one more millisecond and you know what….

There’s something about Mufasa’s mane that genuinely irritates me when I think about it. He was a little too flawless. I think he did irritate my 4 year old self more than Scar and I can say it’s still the same at 35.

THEN IT GOT EVEN BETTER….

Someone dragged Freud in. And I screeched with joy!

MY DAD IS DEAD. And I kind of think he was an asshole for dying when he did.

MUFASA IS MY ASSHOLE.

That’s the whole point of this practice. This is what free association is for. Sometimes the objectively wrong answer is the true one for YOU.

We live in a culture that is very quick to hand out answers.

Very quick to hand out the story of who the villain is, who the hero is, what a something means. And that’s not always wrong, sometimes the cultural narrative is useful shorthand.

But it becomes a problem when we absorb it so completely that we stop noticing it’s a narrative at all. When we mistake consensus for truth. When we assume that because everyone agrees Mufasa is the good one, our own discomfort with him must be the error.

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Here’s what I actually think: multiple things can be true at once.

Mufasa can be the hero of that story and also genuinely irritating to my nervous system. The comment section can be objectively correct and I can still have something real in my association. Neither of those things cancels the other out, and neither one is necessarily more important.

They’re just both true, sitting next to each other, not needing to fight about it.

And it’s only when we can actually stop and go wait, is that true for me…not is that TRUE, but is that true for ME…that anything has a chance of shifting.

You can’t update a story you don’t know you’re living inside.

But the only person who knows what’s actually true for you is you.

Not the book.

Not the expert.

Not the comment section, even when the comment section is right about Mufasa.

And I want to be honest that this is not a comfortable thing to actually live by. Deciding that you are the final word on your own inner life sounds empowering in a newsletter but it gets complicated fast in real life.

It costs things. It can cost relationships, when what you know to be true for you doesn’t match what someone else needs it to be.

It causes misunderstandings, when you’re following a thread that makes total sense from the inside and looks completely irrational from the outside.

Sometimes people just think you’re being difficult. Sometimes you wonder if they’re right.

And I’m not saying other people don’t have things to teach you.

They do. I needed the comments to call me out on Mufasa to go one step deeper for myself. Contact with other people’s perspectives is part of it. But there’s a difference between letting someone’s view push you further into your own truth and just… replacing your truth with theirs because it’s easier. Because they said it more confidently. Because disagreeing felt like too much or a million other reasons.

The practice, whether it’s tarot or journaling or just sitting still for five minutes watching squirrels raid a bird feeder, is just finding ways to get curious about yourself first. Before you hand it over.

So thank you Disney for traumatizing me with the elephant graveyard and thank you followers for helping me go one step deeper for myself.

Lastly, Zazu is also an asshole and that is the only thing in life where there is no nuance.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Most people pull cards, do a reading, and move on.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but something else becomes possible when you document your practice over time, because then you can zoom out. And zooming out is where things get interesting, especially when you have a brain that loves unearthing a pattern.

I noticed it when I pulled the freakin’ 3 of Cups from my deck again tonight and wanted to rip the card up. Those ladies have been everywhere lately, and tonight was the night I got curious about what that reaction was all about.

As I flipped through my recent posts, I saw a thread I hadn’t fully caught at the moment.

It’s not just limited to the 3 of Cups, although they’ve been getting the brunt of it. I ranted about them in a podcast interview, but I also turned the Ten of Cups into a sassy ass sign.

The Four of Wands sent me down a spiral about a piñata.

One card where you feel irritated is just a mood, or a skipped meal.

Three cards in a row where joy feels insulting?

WE HAVE A PATTERN, SHERLOCK and probably some feelings to feel.

Some people might say there’s shadow work to be done here.

But what was actually needed wasn’t shadow work for me, it was grieving.

And I want to sit with that distinction for a second, because I think it matters.

Shadow work implies there’s something to fix, uncover, transform.

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My first impulse is generally to jump to: okay, what work do I need to do here? But when I stopped asking what’s wrong with me for not liking these cards and started asking what is this reaction pointing at the answer came quickly. I’m feeling under-celebrated.

The toxic positivity gremlin in my head slapped me with: YOU NEED TO CELEBRATE YOURSELF, MAGGIE.

Yes... and I’d still like other humans to share that with.

Honestly, it’s a strange thing to be bumping into, because for so long I played down my successes.

I still do, a little. But now that I actually want to share them, to talk about them, and that holding just isn’t available in the way I need right now, it fucking sucks.

That’s not a character flaw to work on. That’s just a real, human ache.

The trickier layer is that the things I want celebrated don’t always register as celebration-worthy by the world’s standards.

Things like:

Letting myself fall back asleep on the couch this morning without interrogating myself about why.

Making tarot content that’s resonating with people, and carrying a vision in my body I can’t quite put words around yet.

Cooking dinner every night this week.

But these are real victories for me.

Rocking a neurodivergent brain in a body that has been through a smidgen of trauma, I’ve learned to clock these moments and feel genuinely proud. The version of me from five years ago would have said, are you serious? And now I know: yes. Completely serious. Part of what I’m grieving is living in a world that would agree with her.

So the grief has layers, and I find it useful to name them rather than lump them together. (PS: Francis Weller talks about this much more elegantly than I do in his latest book)

Collective grief for living in a world that equates celebration with outcomes and a lot of neurotypical, heteronormative milestones.

Grief for who I was before my parents died and before I left my career, and how those moments revealed all the ways I was already held together with dollar-store duct tape.

Grief for the present, and the thinness of the holding I feel in some of my relationships right now. Everyone is spread thin. It’s nobody’s fault and it still hurts.

The paradox in all of it: because of what I’ve been through, I’ve become someone who genuinely wants to spend most of her time savoring the small good things. And right now, those very cards I can’t stand are the ones pointing directly at joy. The ones I’m ready to take a blowtorch to in each of my decks.

None of the individual readings felt like a big reveal in the moment.

The Three of Cups rant was just a rant.

The piñata spiral was just a spiral.

It was only in looking back, without judgment, that the bigger picture emerged.

I wasn’t trying to find a pattern.

That’s what I think a documented tarot practice can do, if you let it.

They were holding up a mirror to exactly where the grief lives.

And I wouldn’t have seen it if I’d just pulled and moved on.

What patterns are you seeing in your cards lately?

—Maggie

PS: Join me on Sunday? ⬇️

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When you’re sitting with a tarot card, you have a rare opportunity to watch yourself make meaning in real time.

I didn’t always see tarot this way. I used to approach it more traditionally, trying to understand what the cards were supposed to mean, trying to get it right.

But over time, I’ve come to prefer tarot as a connective tool, not a predictive one.

A way to connect to myself.

To other people.

And sometimes, to something larger than myself.

If I create the conditions that allow that to emerge, and allow myself to step into them.

My conviction about this continues to deepen as I’ve shared more of my work publicly and connected with others.

When I’m making something with tarot, I’m working with whatever is present for me in that moment. I’m expressing it through the cards, using them as a kind of container.

That act, in essence, is me making meaning.

The cards help me uncover my own meaning, not hand me one.

And that process is incredibly individualized. Two people can look at the same card, or the same situation, and come away with completely different interpretations. We see this everywhere. Even within the same family, two people can grow up in the same house and leave with entirely different experiences of what that meant.

I think meaning emerges from some combination of lived experience (gender, sexuality, race, socioeconomic background) along with neurobiology, body wisdom, intellect, intuition, and spiritual belief. These are the lenses through which we meet the world.

And very often, we don’t fully see those lenses until something reflects them back to us.

That happened to me recently.

Two different people commented on two different posts, each connecting my drawings to specific songs.

At first, I hadn’t consciously made those connections. But when I read their comments, it felt like an immediate yes. I knew both songs. I loved both songs. Of course they had made their way into me. Of course they showed up again.

I just hadn’t noticed. It made me realize how centrally music lives in my own meaning-making process. Not in a way I could easily name, but in a way that was clearly shaping what I was creating.

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And from that, a series of connections opened up:

A connection with the people who commented.

A new relationship to the songs themselves.

A new relationship to the cards I had used.

And maybe most unexpectedly, a new connection to how I make meaning.

Something became visible that wasn’t before.

This is where I think tarot has the potential to be incredibly connective.

The imagery, especially in decks like those illustrated by Pamela Coleman Smith, is open enough to invite projection. It doesn’t tell you exactly what to see. It lets you participate.

And when you create from that space, others can meet your work the same way.

Meaning moves between people. It reflects. It expands.

This notion is not new and this way of using tarot is not new, but I also think something gets in the way of this more often than we acknowledge.

We don’t have many spaces where we can practice meaning-making out loud.

Where we can explore what something means to us without immediately deferring to what it’s “supposed” to mean.

And I don’t think that’s accidental.

A lot of the structures we move within, consciously or not, are designed in ways that discourage us from trusting our own perception. They teach us to look outward for authority.

That dynamic shows up in dominant tarot narrative too.

Not because people have bad intentions, often it’s the opposite. But when we enter a practice through unexamined structures, we can absorb something alongside the knowledge: the idea that the authority on our lives exists somewhere outside of us.

We all need scaffolding while we’re learning. But at a certain point, it’s worth asking:

When does scaffolding stop being temporary and start becoming something we live inside?

I built much of my early tarot practice around other people’s structures.

And eventually, it started to feel like trying to live in a house designed for someone else. The countertops were the wrong height. The layout didn’t quite fit. But instead of questioning the design, I assumed the problem was me.

I see this play out in small ways all the time:

The anxiety about whether you shuffled correctly.

The worry that not using reversals makes your reading less valid.

The feeling that you need a spread, a system, or someone more experienced to confirm what you’re seeing.

None of these things are inherently wrong. Many people find real value in them.

But when structure starts to override your own perception, when you look at a card and immediately reach for what it’s supposed to mean instead of what it means to you, I think that’s worth noticing.

Because often in that moment, something else is happening.

You can feel it, if you allow.

A flicker of something else that feels true.

And almost immediately right alongside it, a voice that questions it.

But the book says…

But my teacher said…

That friction isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s information. It’s an opportunity for curiosity.

Where did I learn that?

Does it feel true right now?

What happens if I try something different?

This isn’t about rejecting everything or creating chaos. It’s about allowing a little more of yourself to be present in the process.

And sometimes, after questioning something, you might decide to keep it exactly as it is.

But now it’s a choice.

This is part of why I’ve developed a complicated relationship with the idea of reading cards for people inside the existing structure.

Not because it can’t be done with care or integrity, it absolutely can. But the structure itself often places meaning in the hands of the reader.

Even subtly, it can create the dynamic: I interpret. You receive.

And even when there’s room to accept or reject that interpretation, there can still be a cost.

Each time we outsource meaning, we get a little more practiced at not trusting our own.

I’m not alone in this concern. The tarot ecosystem is changing.

There are many different ways to approach the cards: divination, intuitive, psychological, archetypal. Many different types of readers.

But, what some people are actually reaching for, I think, is something harder to name: a sense that the structure itself doesn’t fit them. But in looking for an alternative, they often just find themselves inside a different one, a house made for someone else, because we consider the cards first, not ourselves.

As I’ve been studying my own relationship with tarot and observing and talking to others about theirs, I found myself wondering if relationship anarchy, a philosophy that questions the hierarchical and inherited templates of relationships, might help me understand and express my philosophical approach to tarot. And it does. They map onto each other in a way that feels natural.

Tarot, like human connection, resists containment.

Its history is contested, its meanings debated, its correct use constantly argued. In the same way that what constitutes a marriage or partnership is under relentless debate.

But maybe that’s not a problem to solve.

Maybe that’s the most honest thing about it.

I’ve been privately referring to my approach to the cards as Tarot Anarchy for a while now.

This is my first attempt to really describe it publicly. Not as a rejection of tradition for the sake of it, but as a commitment to designing my own practice and giving myself permission to legitimize it. To perhaps offer language to others as well, because I think if what you’re doing creates genuine contact with yourself, with another person, or with something larger, then it counts.

It is real.

My Tarot Anarchy Manifesto

1. Meaning is Personal: There is no one true meaning of the cards. Meaning comes from you, and it will is allowed to change over time.

2. Practice is personal: There is no one way to use tarot. Your practice is valid no matter what it looks like.

3. Autonomy Over Authority: Learn from others, but allow yourself to be the final source of truth.

4. Stay Curious: Be curious about what you bring to the cards and about what the cards may bring to you.

5. Discomfort is Data: Fear is a signal, pause, discern and act accordingly.

6. Play is Power: Intellect only goes so far. Play is the pathway to intuition.

7. Allow Connection: Listen to what arrives, no matter now mundane. Threads are everywhere.

8. Leave Room for Magic (however you define it): Things may happen that you will not be able to explain. They are valid. They are real.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of this.

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I’m a queer tarot anarchist.

That’s probably the most succinct way to introduce where this is all coming from.

What I mean is: I don’t trust inherited structures just because they’re familiar. I question default hierarchies in relationships, in community, and yes, in tarot. That lens shapes everything about how I approach this work.

The heart of this really is all about consent: whether people truly understand the kind of experience they’re agreeing to when they ask me for a reading.

So when people ask me to read their cards, my answer right now is no, not because I doubt myself, but because I haven’t yet figured out how to create a clear container: a shared understanding of what the reading is, what it isn’t, and how power is being held.

The traditional format doesn’t get us there. And I’m not willing to offer something that might unintentionally mislead people about what they’re stepping into.

This is all me thinking out loud, working through my approach as my reach grows and I connect with more people, and it’s fluid. I’d genuinely love to hear how others are sitting with these questions too because I know I’m not alone. I know there are people out there doing this work and having these conversations that I’ve yet to encounter.

I can feel the tarot world shifting.

More practitioners questioning the traditional reader dynamics, pushing back on the fortune-teller archetype, asking harder questions about consent and power.

That conversation matters, especially right now, when so many of us are living with massive uncertainty and upheaval. These times make people (myself included) hungry enough to mistake certainty for care.

Which is exactly when the ethics of how we hold this work become most important.

The dominant narrative around tarot goes like this: you arrive with a question and leave with an answer. One person holds the authority. The other receives it.

I believe that setup has real consequences. I know this from lived experience not only when I’ve reached for tarot readings myself in the past, but also from being on the receiving end of harmful systems, and years spent as an educator working in one.

I’m not immune to this pull. I’ve caught myself doom-scrolling TikTok, grabbing onto a stranger’s reading as if it were fact. I even reached out to a trusted, ethical reader friend literally last week when I felt desperate for answers. The fact that I, someone who thinks carefully about this, still felt that pull tells me something important. If I’m not immune, I can’t assume anyone else is either. That’s not a reason to avoid tarot and there will never be a way to completely dissolve these issues, I just feel like it’s a reason to be intentional about the containers I am building around it.

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I want tarot to be a practice that helps people find their own answers.

A process of co-creating meaning, not receiving verdicts. A space that strengthens agency, not replaces it.

In practice, that might look like this: I draw a card, name what I notice in the image, and ask what stirs in you when you look at it. We compare. We follow the threads. You leave with something you found, not something I handed you.

But to me it feels like the dominant narrative is still so pervasive that I can’t just offer a different kind of reading and expect people to understand what they’re stepping into. I think we are still at a point that when most people hear “tarot reading,” they’re picturing a reader, a querent, and a verdict.

So before anyone can meaningfully consent to something co-created and agency-centered, they need to know that version exists, and I need to be able to translate it clearly.

Tarot as Connection

For me, tarot has always been about connection. Connection to ourselves, to each other, to something larger than either. That’s what makes it meaningful and that’s also what makes the traditional one-on-one reading format feel limiting to me.

When one person holds the cards and the other waits for answers, something has the potential to get lost: the relational quality. The sense that we’re all in this together, fumbling toward meaning. It can be done. I’ve read for people in the past, used cards with coaching clients, but the times when this has felt the most powerful and potent to me is when I’m working with small groups. Not primarily because it diffuses power dynamics, though it does, but because it feels truer to what tarot actually is for me.

For example, when multiple people sit with the same card and each finds something different in it, that’s not a problem to solve. That’s the whole point. We’re not looking for the answer. We’re looking for each other, and for ourselves via the card.

It might be unconventional to say “no, thank you” when someone offers money for a reading. But for me, honoring the ethics of this work matters more than following the script.

I believe if tarot is going to help, really help then it needs to bring us back to ourselves. Not further away. And I’m still figuring out exactly what that looks like. If any of this resonates or if you see it differently, I’d love to hear from you.

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PS: What happens when you put a bunch of curious people in a (zoom)room with tarot cards, and the only goal is to answer that question?

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I knew I wanted to write something tonight, but I didn’t quite know what. So I decided to practice what I preach and I pulled two random tarot cards…the Three of Cups (those ladies are just mocking me lately, I swear) and the Knight of Swords. It led me on a little internal adventure that reminded me about the power of perspective and the ability we have to shape the stories we tell ourselves.

As my calzone heated up in my air fryer, I got my paper out and I started digging in, here’s what happened:

My First Impressions

The first thing I noticed was the energy of the Knight of Swords. He looked like he was about to crash into the brunch festivities and cause a catastrophic mimosa spill and the 3 of Cups had no idea.

Almost instantly, I felt my body want to put myself in the gap between the two cards. I had inserted myself into the scene and I was willing to get trampled to try and stop the disaster which PISSED ME OFF.

Here Come the Feelings

I’m the eldest daughter, the “responsible one”, an extremely competent problem solver and someone who has worked very hard to not play the role of rescuer, yet here it was again, my first impulse when I looked at these two cards together. It was quickly followed by a wave of sadness and longing. I wanted to be in the 3 of Cups card. I wanted to be the one celebrating with no fear of impending doom, but if I was really being honest with myself, if I imagined myself hanging out with the 3 of Cups, I just got the ick. I really have a difficult time connecting with that card.

Enter the Meaning-Making

I started noticing a story pop up that anytime I’ve gotten close to that 3 of Cups feeling it’s been ripped away from me.

Thankfully I had oodles of outside time this weekend (one of my top self-care activities) which means that I have enough cognitive flexibility so I noticed something interesting about that story I started to tell myself…the word always. A little all-or-nothing thinking, my favorite cognitive distortion.

Is it ALWAYS the case that when I’m happy I then lose the thing or the person? No, that is not always the case.

Once I sorted that I entered my next crossroad: my impulse to then make MYSELF the problem. If I’m not always losing things that make me feel happy and connected, but right now I don’t feel happy and connected then I MUST BE THE PROBLEM. I just need to figure out where I’m blocking myself and then I can fix this whole thing immediately.

Flipping the Script

The reality of my life is that I am a grief girl. I have suffered a lot of loss. The feelings of sadness and loneliness the 3 of Cups stirred up wanted to be felt. That was helpful, but what was not so helpful was this new narrative about me getting in my own way now.

So, I got curious once more and started to wonder if there was another story that was playing out between these two cards that I hadn’t noticed initially. Is there another way to look at the cards in these positions?

I was really stuck and so I decided to physically swap the two cards.

When this happened, something interesting occurred.

Almost all the emotional charge disappeared. The scene became a bit neutral.

I didn’t feel the urge to climb into the white space between the two cards.

I wasn’t so concerned about the Knight.

The 3 of Cups was now just a little meh.

But suddenly, I couldn’t locate where I belonged anymore.

That’s another familiar feeling and because I was committed to curiosity at this point, I picked up my deck in search of a card that I felt like I belonged in.

Out came the 8 of Pentacles.

Suddenly, I was no longer blocking my own happiness, but realizing that right this second, I’m in a season where I want to make space for whatever is in front of me, like the figure in the 8 of Pentacles is doing. I have some big things I’m integrating and moving through and it’s a bit solitary, steady and sometimes slow work that cannot be rushed. If someone was to walk up and sit down next to me on that bench, would I be okay with it? And I would be, but right now I’m actually not in 3 of Cups mode and that’s okay.

My Takeaways

What this practice reminded me of tonight is the power of position and perspective. That in tarot, sometimes position does matter in the sense that the way two cards are positioned can impact the way the cards interface, and in life the perspectives and narratives we carry can impact the way we move through the world.

It also reminded me of the power of flipping the script. That ultimately, we have the ability to rework our own inner narratives. That sometimes the stories we are telling ourselves are not the most helpful and that allowing ourselves to be curious about what else may be true can, at a minimum, neutralize some suffering.

Lastly, I can sometimes get hung up on walking away from my cards or a situation with clear action items or a conclusion. I think landing on the 7 of Pentacles tonight as the card where I felt like I belonged right now reminded me that sometimes resolution isn’t always the end game, sometimes it’s just being with what is.

-Maggie (feel free to say hi on insta too)

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PS: What happens when you put a bunch of curious people in a (zoom)room with tarot cards, and the only goal is to answer that question?

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I wish there were some vivid, beautiful plotline I could write about in lush detail about why I entered the world of tarot. Unfortunately, it’s much less poetic and a bit more traumatic.

I suppose if I had to summarize my tarot origin story in six words, it would be this:

“Is my Mom dying? What’s the plan?”

My first deck came at a time when I was feeling equal parts more certain about myself than I ever had, while simultaneously bracing.

My mom had never been really healthy. Pick a system, body or mind and spin the wheel.

But 2021 was the year her health was failing so much that I could no longer chalk it up to poor lifestyle choices.

And so I found myself doubling down on anything that might connect me to something larger, something that could stop me from falling apart and also keep me from losing myself.

I needed a plan.

Truthfully, I was still a little scared of tarot at the time, but I was more scared about what might happen to my mom. So I mustered the courage of my newly claimed spiritual and intuitive side, went to a store, wandered around awkwardly (I wrote about that experience in detail here), and left with a deck of tarot cards.

It feels like another lifetime ago, even though it was only a little over five years.

My mom was eventually diagnosed with ALS and died less than a year after I bought those cards. My dad died unexpectedly a few months after I bought them too. I lost both parents within the span of a year.

What I can say is that even throughout my mom’s illness, even while I was taking care of her, I kept going to the cards and not coming up with much.

Partly because I wasn’t using them in a way that actually felt good to me (also a story for another day), and partly because I don’t actually think tarot can predict the future…not really. But what those cards did do is keep me company.

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They gave me something physical to anchor into. A tangible reminder that something larger than me existed, the way the ocean does, or small quiet moments in nature. And I kept circling back to them (AGAIN, another story for another day).

If you follow me on Instagram, I posted something late last night. It was built around a simple phrase: I wonder.

It might look like I’m just doing tarot on the surface. But what’s actually going on in this mind is a lot of wondering.

About what’s happening around the cards.

About what’s happening in the field between a person and a card.

About the stories of why people first reached for them.

So if you want to, tell me your tarot origin story.

You can give me a six-word summary.

You can write me a few paragraphs.

I’m genuinely curious what made you pick up your cards.

I have a few theories about threads that connect us all, but this mind needs some data.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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PS: What happens when you put a bunch of curious people in a (zoom)room with tarot cards, and the only goal is to answer that question?

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After earning a well-deserved milkshake tonight, I flipped through my tarot cards and two jumped out at me: the Page of Wands and the Three of Cups. I wasn’t sure why, so I did what I usually do, sat with the images for a few minutes and jotted down what I noticed.

Pretty quickly, it became clear what was on my mind. Three questions surfaced:

1. How do you measure growth?

2. Whose ruler are you using?

3. How do you celebrate growth you can’t see?

The growth theme feels especially fitting. In New England we are officially in spring as of yesterday. Plants are slowly starting to bloom and this morning I discovered a tiny new growth on my cactus adopted cactus, Ziggy. Everything is quietly becoming something, including me.

How do I measure growth? Honestly, I don’t have a clean answer, which surprises me as such a growth oriented human. For a long time, my growth was hierarchical and legible: go to school, get the job, shore up finances, move out. I followed the traditional escalator. A lot of those milestones were measured by a ruler that wasn’t mine. Then life exploded 5 years ago and I took a hammer to the escalator.

So, I think before I can answer the question of how to measure growth, I have to get curious about what I want to grow. And right now, for me, that looks like:

• Cultivating more self-trust

• Leaning into vulnerability and visibility

• Allowing myself to receive care and support

• Creating space to pursue learning just for the sake of learning

• Prioritizing rest that lets my brain and body actually sync up

Which brings me to that third question and this is the one that’s really sitting with me.

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How do you celebrate growth you can’t see?

In therapy on Friday, I had one of those sessions where something major clicks into place and you end up equal parts horrified that you didn’t see it before and filled with relief because now you do, you can keep an eye on it. The gist is that I don’t have many mirrors in my daily life. Being an entrepreneur and doing contract work means no one at work has regular eyes on me.

Being single right now means there isn’t a partner or a friend I’m in contact with every single day. The only creatures who have consistent eyes and ears on me are my three dogs and myself.

What I understood on Friday is that this has created a perfect breeding ground to supercharge my already over reflective tendencies.

It’s not that I need someone to manage me, but because without those mirrors, I lose access to the gentle, casual reflections that remind you you’re a person in motion. Hey, you seem tired. Hey, I’ve noticed this. Everything good?

Without that, I’ve been left to track myself entirely from the inside. And what’s resulted, without fully meaning to, is that I’ve built really extensive internal checking habits.

Constantly scanning, am I okay? How close am I to overdoing it? When do I need to stop? Which is different from, and much more exhausting than, actually looking for signs of growth.

So I like that these cards came up today. A lot of what I’m growing is internal, but it has to show up somewhere eventually. So what would I notice externally, behaviorally, in myself or my environment, if I was actually cultivating more self-trust? If my brain and body were syncing up? If I was making space for curiosity? What would start to shift?

That, I think, is the ruler I actually want to use.

As tarot tends to do, I’m walking away with more questions than when I pulled two cards.

I’m curious what came up for you when you looked at these cards or whether any of these questions are live for you too?

I think there’s something genuinely powerful about thinking through this stuff in dialogue. It’s another point of contact, another set of mirrors. We can build off each other, create some good friction.

Let me know in the comments or come check in on instagram.

PS: What happens when you put a bunch of curious people in a (zoom)room with tarot cards, and the only goal is to answer that question?

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I’ve spent the last few hours debating what I wanted to do with this piece of writing. I wrote and submitted a first draft for the The Rebis’ Moon edition, and they passed.

I considered sitting on it, revising it, and submitting it to a few other places. But it felt fitting that it found its way back to me on today’s new moon. So I spent some time editing it and decided to share it here.

The Plot

The granite is cool on my bare shoulders. It’s July. The air is thick. Sweat drops onto my chest. How many years will pass before the tree behind me grows tall enough to provide shade? Will I be dead before it happens?

I want to ease more of my body against the stone. To be supported.

But I hesitate. As I usually do.

How much pressure can my parents’ name and Mary Oliver’s words take before it topples?

People kick gravestones over.

If a foot could do it, my fat body is certainly too much.

I stand up.

I don’t understand cemeteries. I never have.

I didn’t find the sort-by-price feature on the funeral home computer fast enough to be spared the sight of the $40,000 Promethean.

My dad did not end up in the Promethean.

Neither did my mom.

I opted for the same make and model they chose for my brother.

Who was I to second-guess their taste?

It was oak or mahogany. I can’t be certain.

I don’t want to be here. When I die that is. But there’s room if I want it.

Each plot comes with two spots for cremated remains.

What a steal. Just like the land my family is decomposing in.

I won’t change my mind.

I want to be burned.

Deposited along a busy summer shoreline.

My elbow wafting into a peanut butter and jelly.

My big toe mixing with a white man’s Bud Light.

The rest finding its way into the bellies of crustaceans.

They’re not picky.

I learned this working in a fish market, watching lobsters awaiting their death feast on each other.

Those cannibals would love my cellulite.

A car door slams.

A dog jumps out and promptly pisses on the “NO DOGS ALLOWED” sign.

What time was it anyway?

A steamy shit arrives next.

Another person may have taken offense, but I have more in common with that dog than the dead people beneath my feet.

Who are we to dictate where an animal defecates?

Who was the Catholic Church to tell me I could still go to heaven as long as I didn’t act on my gayness?

A loophole logged in high school theology class, while simultaneously wondering if my period had leaked through my wool uniform skirt or if my vagina was just sweaty from the lack of air circulation.

Now, here I am, sweating, trying, on ways to tell my parents’ corpses that I had watched the moon rise on a beach with a woman I fell for. That love was possible for me.

I’ve been a dog pissing on signs longer than I realized.

A primal ache rises.

I want to lay down on the prickly grass.

To be held by the earth between my brother and parents.

But my body doesn’t move.

What the hell am I doing here?

I’m slightly startled by the sound of my own voice.

I know the answer.

Living…

in defiance of the system that handed my mother a folded American flag with pride as she buried her son, his skull shattered by the bullets they taught him to fire with military precision.

in defiance of the silence perpetuated by Irish Catholic culture, that created a father who could not feel unless alcohol coursed through his veins.

in defiance of the lesson taught by rocks that pelted my mother on her walk home from school, one that caused her to hate her body and fear the shape of mine.

I notice the moon crest over the horizon.

I step out from between the two stones, and head toward my car.

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One of the most common tips tossed around when you’re starting out with tarot is to use spreads. A lot of the arguments make sense: there are a lot of cards, a lot of meanings, a lot of competing symbolic systems all jostling for space in your head. Put the card in a position, let the position do some of the work.

Simple.

I live by the motto work smarter not harder, so I was ready to be a spread fangirl. What actually happened was that I ended up more stuck than before.

It took me a while to understand why. What I eventually landed on is that it comes down to how my brain works. I have ADHD, and while challenge number one with spreads is remembering what the damn positions mean, this is hard enough with a two card spread, so I’ve never once been tempted by a Celtic Cross, the hardest challenge is actually how spreads clash with the movement of my mind.

I think associatively and non-linearly. I don’t go from point A to point B. I move from point A to a goose, to a Mary Oliver poem, to something I haven’t thought about in six years, and then suddenly I’m where I need to be.

The good news is tarot is a pretty perfect tool for a brain like that. The cards are visual and symbolic and a little weird. They invite side quests. So when I pull a card and just look at it, my thinking radiates outward, one association finding another, following the thread wherever it goes until something clicks.

The problem with spreads is that they put a concrete box around the card before I’ve even started. And once that box is there, everything changes. Instead of my thoughts moving outward, they ricochet around between the card and its assigned position. There’s no room to expand. It literally feels claustrophobic.

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This creates more negotiating with my own brain than actually working with the card. I look at it, and immediately the image doesn’t match the position. So I think, okay, maybe I’m being too literal, maybe I need to go more symbolic, maybe I’m reading this wrong and suddenly I’m spending all my energy managing the gap between the card and the box instead of actually listening to what the card has to say.

What actually works for me is pulling cards and letting my brain do its thing. Moving back and forth between them freely. Letting one remind me of a TV show, which then leads somewhere else, allowing the relationship between the cards to emerge instead of being assigned in advance. It can be a bit slower. It can feel chaotic internally, and not everything that comes to mind is relevant but it works for me.

I want to be clear: my brain CAN work with a spread. It’s not that spreads are broken, or that I’m broken. It’s a mismatch. For an ADHD brain that’s already managing a lot of background noise, the extra friction of fighting a structure isn’t a small thing. It’s the difference between thinking with the cards and thinking at them.

Tarot has taught me a lot about how I think, maybe more than it’s taught me about anything else.

And sometimes I’ll use a spread anyway. Just to be annoying to myself, and some of them seem SO FUN. But mostly I don’t.

What’s your relationship with spreads? What have you learned about how your mind works with tarot?

PS: If you like scribbles there’s plenty more on Instagram.

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I have trouble forming questions.

Actually that’s a lie. I’m an excellent questioner under certain conditions. It’s actually one of my favorite hobbies.

When I’m asking someone else a question, questioning a practice or system, or when the stakes feel broad enough that I’m not worried about leaving something out, I thrive.

But the whole notion of having a question to ask my tarot cards makes my brain glitch out hard. At least it used to. Before I stopped asking my cards questions.

Suddenly a question had to be the right question, had to be ready, had to be formed before the cards could do anything. And that assumption, that I needed to have a clean, articulable ask, was the thing that was making me freeze.

Because how do you find the right words for something you’re uncertain about in the first place?

It was the same feeling I get when someone asks me my favorite movie.

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For a while I thought it was a skill issue and that I could get better at it. So I approached it the way I approach most things: with curiosity and a hefty dose of scrolling and several new books.

But it didn’t get easier. Which made me realize it’s not a skill gap. It wasn’t about my ability to ask questions. It was me trying to force a way of using the cards to work for me that didn’t work for my brain.

On Sunday, I took a course with (author of Tarot for Change) that helped me put language around how I inherently approach tarot, and a lot of my life, frankly. Post-structuralism. The philosophy, in a really watered down way, asserts that words are inherently unstable, that everything is a matter of interpretation, and meaning shifts depending on who’s reading and when and why. I left eager to put it into practice in an even more meta way: by poking at the question of how to ask good tarot questions.

For years now, I mostly don’t arrive with a question at all. I pull, and I let the images do the asking. I see what surfaces. I notice what I resist and what pulls me in. Questions often emerge from that. They don’t precede it.

Social media is built on content that presents itself as a solution. I save a lot of it. I’ve learned from a lot of it. But I think there are moments where sitting with my own questions, including why I was so hung up on learning how to ask good tarot questions, would’ve served me more than consuming someone else’s answers, especially when I was first learning tarot. Maybe I would’ve let go of the structure sooner. Or maybe not. I genuinely don’t know.

That’s kind of the point?

What comes up for you around this questions, “how to ask good tarot questions?”

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