How I Got to Here

In the interest of openness here at That One Tarot Chick, let's talk about what brought me to tarot. What better place to start than at the beginning, right?

During my sophomore year of college, I found myself studying abroad and landed in the very mystical city of Glastonbury. From an early age, I was enamored of fiction about witches and magic, vampires and other stories of the supernatural. I would go on to study many different world religions and to think deeply and often about how human beings try to ascribe greater meaning to our existence. That day in Glastonbury, I felt as if the very air was steeped in magic and I was determined to bring some of it home with me to the American Midwest. So I let a whim (or fate, universe spirit, what have you) guide me to a used deck of tarot cards priced at 8 pounds: The Tarot of the Cat People. Being a cat person, this deck felt like the right choice, so I purchased it. The deck and I traveled together after that for many years, not to directly encounter one another again until the year I graduated from college.

Halfway through my first year as the holder of a Bachelor of Fine Arts, I found myself battling an unimaginable jealousy for the very students I taught in my new AmeriCorps position as a College Bridge counselor. They were in classes, and I was not! I had no syllabus, no curriculum to follow. No one was leading me to learn anything. I couldn't stand it any more. I had to do something.

A few clicks through the Cincinnati Library website later, I found myself enrolling in a free online course: Tarot 101. That is where this journey truly begins. I (quite literally) dusted off The Tarot of the Cat People and began to study, for the first time in my life, for the sheer intention of learning something new.

Fast forward to the end of the roughly two weeks it took me to finish that course. I began to watch YouTube videos of astrology-based tarot predictions. I did daily readings for myself and, finally, I began to tuck The Tarot of the Cat People into my purse to bring with me to get togethers, just in case the night led us to doing tarot readings for fun.

Eventually, I found myself sitting on the floor spreading out the cards for each member of my AmeriCorps group who had come on our annual trip to West Virginia.

It was then that I started to realize that I had found my first true hobby, strange one though it may be. And then, of course, I decided I wanted to share it with the internet... so here we are!