The Uncomfortable Reason I Don't Do Predictive Tarot

My “For You” page is certain that I want to know if my soulmate is thinking about me right now. It doesn’t know that I don’t have a soulmate-shaped hole in my life it needs to fill. But it has made the decision regardless, and every third video is some version of “this person cannot stop thinking about you, pick a card to find out who.”

I watch these sometimes. Not to judge… okay, a little to judge.

But mostly because I’m fascinated by how confidently the internet will tell you what is going to happen to you on a Tuesday. Here is the thing nobody wants to hear about tarot… It doesn’t divine your future. I have been using tarot for more than a decade. I own more decks than any reasonable adult should, and I am telling you plainly, the cards are not a crystal ball in a clever deck-shaped disguise. The cards have never told me my actual future. Not once. What they did was much less glamorous and, as it turns out, much more useful. They told me the truth about my present. Loudly. Repeatedly. Whether I wanted to hear it or not.

Early on, I wanted the predictions. I wanted certainty. I wanted anything/anyone, a card, a stranger, a vaguely psychic-feeling Tarot Tuesday to just tell me it was going to work out. That the job would come through. That the relationship would miraculously revive. That the thing I was scared of wasn’t going to happen. I pulled cards looking for a guarantee, or at the very least, to brace myself for the impending onslaught.

What I got instead, over and over, was a mirror. The Eight of Swords showed up when I felt trapped by choices I’d actually made myself. The Nine of Wands showed up when I was exhausted and still refusing to just stand down. None of that predicted anything. It just refused to let me lie to myself about where I already was. Armored up and ready to hack-and-slash my way through every uncomfortable conversation with a helluva lot of damage-control clean up after. That’s a much harder sell than “your ex is thinking about you.” I know. Nobody’s scrolling in bed at night hoping a stranger on the internet will offer them accountability at a reasonable price. But it’s also the only version of this that’s ever actually helped anyone I’ve worked with. Nervous systems don’t calm down because a card promised them a good outcome. They calm down because someone finally pointed out that you are the master of your own destiny and well, you have some choices to make, don’t you?

And there is another reason I don’t do predictive tarot. Prediction can quietly teach people to abandon their own authority. Once you’re told what will happen, every choice you consider begins orbiting that prediction. You stop asking for guidance or what the situation is showing you. You stop trusting your intuition and what your gut is telling you. Instead, you start waiting for the cards to be right. That may look like waiting for spiritual guidance, but sometimes it is anxiety wearing a mystical party hat. Your personal agency is more important to me than any practice or system that claims it can show you how to move through your life.

So no, I’m not going to tell you your soulmate is thinking about you. I don’t know that. I don’t know if you even have one, or want one, or would recognize them if they showed up wearing the wrong astrological sign. What I can tell you is what’s actually sitting in the room with you right now, energetically speaking… And I promise you, that’s the more interesting reading anyway.

The cards don’t know your future. They’re just annoyingly, sometimes infuriatingly, good at describing your present. Turns out that’s plenty enough.

Questions for you:

1. Have you ever received a tarot reading that influenced the choices you made afterward? How did it help you trust yourself?

2. Or did you prefer to wait for the spread’s prediction to come true? How did that benefit you?

Tarot Traveler explores tarot, dreams, archetypes, and the strange business of being human without spiritual bypassing or borrowed certainty.

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