The Temperance Card Is Haunting Me
Pulling cards, draining patience.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
Have you ever felt motivationally and creatively dehydrated? Shriveled, if you will? That’s me. That’s this whole summer, really. You know that line in Shakespeare In Love, “It’s like trying to pick a lock with a wet herring?” One of my favorites. I’ve tried to shake my creativity loose through all the old routes: reading, dissolving into a good film, gazing at cookbooks knowing I’ll never make the recipes, normal stuff. Nothing seems to spark or satiate, and I guess one benefit of spending years in guided meditations and journal pages and reparenting efforts is knowing that when you can’t find an answer, you aren’t meant to have it yet.
I bought my first Tarot deck somewhere around 2016 and had no idea what I was doing. Or why, for that matter. I initially pulled cards when I was lost and desperate (you remember 2016). These days I’d never read for myself from a place like that. Over time I’ve developed a much firmer understanding of the Tarot itself and also why I feel drawn to it. It’s my favorite method of divination, if you want to call it that, because with one exception you’ll read about in a second, I’m able to do it with extreme clarity. I’ll read for other people sometimes now, I no longer have any shyness about that. It’s something I enjoy and I hope I’m helpful. Tarot has helped me. Except right now, in this moment that seems void of creativity and increasingly void of purpose, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. Apparently the Temperance card has ideas.