"it sounds like you believe your tarot deck is a person"

i have prescribed my tarot deck sentience. the world did it to me first

Often, I think about how I had to be taught how to be a person before I could become one.

Childhood is so heavy for the body, absorbing pain at an excruciatingly slow pace, like it must register the memory, like it’s waiting for you to learn what it means before it will allow you to release it. The world is so big and foggy and unknowable, and all you ever know is questions, and it is a coin flip as to whether or not you will be rewarded for actually asking them.

What makes me a person? It is the soul housed in the human body, most people would probably say. 

But I wasn’t really born as this person. I sponged up everything other people gave me so that I could be this person, and then often their answers dictated the kind of person I thought I could become. I am only as much of a person as I have been allowed to be, and now am only as much of a person as I believe I can be.

the sum of something and the piece of a sum

In the gut alone, humans house an ecosystem of trillions of tiny microorganisms that determine how well we live and function on earth. When it is disrupted, our bodily systems can break down.

from clevelandclinic.org

I exist thanks to the microorganisms in my body and they exist because of me, but they alone don’t “make me a person,” right? And they are not “people” either.

Still, being a person, down to our core bodily functions, is always about being a part of something, and also having something be a part of you. Part of a family. Part of a womb. Part of a planet. You can (and will) detach yourself from things as you learn to live and breathe, but being something’s part (even for a short time) will alter the trajectory of your personhood regardless, even when you feel like your own whole.

We don’t like attaching our personhood to other people, understandably. Agency and free will are comforting thoughts. Is my life meaningful because other people gave it to me? Maybe not — but that’s certainly a lot of it, right?

Most things only have as much meaning as we are willing to give them. We have pondered this for centuries. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?”

me and my mom and my dead friends and the world and you

I like cliches, so it’s fitting for me that my first tarot deck actually was a gift. When I hold it now the sides are gritty and worn from years of use, but when I held it then, it was still clean and held in the velvet drawstring bag my mother purchased for me. And so it was magical then because it was hers, and it is magical now because I have made it mine.

Contrary to semi-popular belief, being a “generational tarot reader” isn’t special to me because I was gifted superpowers like a wizarding bloodline or something (that would be cool though, I guess). It’s special in the way that being a part of anything is special — because I love my mom, and I love my grandmother, and I love that we share something, and I’d love it even if that something weren’t a tarot practice and instead was a family recipe or a religious tradition or a favorite sport.

I love being a person. I love the people who taught me how to be one. I love cards and the people who gave me them.
It is that simple.

so do you really believe it’s a person?

The truth is I am just abiding by the logic that has always made the most sense to me. The deck was given to me by someone else, the books that taught me are in a different author’s words, and the readings I conduct always feel like conversations.

Even when I treat the deck as some sort of extension of “me,” I question what this really means. The world is full of pieces of us everywhere all the time, and if I so desire, I can see pieces of anyone I want to in everything.

We do this a lot for people who die and rarely question it. When an old friend of mine from high school died a couple years ago, I suddenly noticed her everywhere — every redwood tree circle, every abandoned road at nighttime, every overcast beach. The top of each hiking trail. The polaroid she took of my brother and I, pinned above my desk, suddenly catching my vision even though it didn’t before.

Is this stuff all she was as a person? No, but also I could not contain my memory of her to just one body even if I wanted to. The mark of a human life is so vast and interconnected with everything that it so very obviously transcends a singular place, memory, or body. She is herself and also everything she ever loved.

I had read her with this deck too, just like the deck has known most people I love, just like I know them too.

So no, technically, I have never really consciously sat down to assign my tarot deck a personality or sentience, but I probably speak of the deck in the way that I speak of a person most likely because it carries so many of the qualities, memories, and experiences that I associate with being a person — being loved, being known, being a part of a conversation, being a part of something larger than itself and also being the thing that contains many parts.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that most of us intuitively or unconsciously treat our decks like how we remember growing up as children ourselves. We say a deck must “absorb” our energy or that it will “develop its voice” over time, or that we must take time to “bond with the deck” or “break it in.” We see it as a sponge maybe because it is one but also maybe because we were one first, and we see personhood in a tarot deck because we see personhood in everything, because that is also what being a person is. (To me, at least).

I ask my tarot deck if it feels like a person and it hands me back the Page of Cups, which is also what it told me my signifier was when I was 15 and I was barely the person I am now, which is to say maybe its origin point is me but also maybe the deck is some of my origin point too.

It sounds like the deck believes I am a person too.
It feels good to be believed.