Wikaryasz

I have decided to accept the advice from an Italian card playing game — also known as tarot. And no, I don’t believe I’m delusional for that decision. The cards told me to let go and enjoy the present — pretty standard advice if you ask a rando on the street.

Tarot is a divination tool made up of 78 cards, which are based on a standard deck of playing cards. Mediums, spiritual practitioners, and the generally curious use tarot as a tool to connect with energies, spirits, advice, or insight. The hopelessly romantic folks — like myself — tend to pull out a deck or seek out a reader when they are lost in love.

The uses of tarot are endless.

Last month I met up with a trusted tarot expert in town and she gave me a reading that was enlightening, to say the least. Perhaps a bit scary — especially for my mother.

Her reading summarized a very confusing, fleeting, and hopeless infatuation that I let myself fall victim to despite my best efforts. It was as if she replayed the past three years this lovesickness has held its grip on me — a predatory bird with its beak lodged into my left eye and talons piercing my chest.

Her blind reading validated my mother’s assumptions of the infatuation and my mother’s advice: stop looking at your phone expecting him to reply. To both of their dismay, I have not heeded their advice — yet.

I’m working on it.

Other cards this tarot expert pulled represented uncertainty, confusion, and quickness. She told me that I’m moving too fast towards abstract outcomes which I have not defined yet.

This made a lot of sense to me.

I was what some would call a “career academic.” After reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, I discovered that this phenomenon is not new, nor is it a unique plight. Perhaps the phenomenon is new to women post the sexual revolution since things like birth control and tolerance towards sexual freedom placed pressure on young women, and young men, to have endless novel experiences in lieu of seeking personal fulfillment.

“How dare I sacrifice my twenties to start a family?” I’ve asked myself.

“If you are smart, it would be a shame not to go to college,” the little devil on my shoulder said. “It would be disrespectful to the women before you who couldn’t get an education, so you must.”

My lover, my vice, my dopamine kick was always academic validation. Now that I am in my post-college era, I now have to find a new obsession. A new goal. A new passion.

While reading The Bell Jar, I empathized with Esther’s listlessness. Esther, an English prodigy student with all the characteristics needed to make a good editor at a New York City publishing house, fell into an agonizing depression after completing her prestigious New York City internship and after she was rejected by a prestigious MFA program.

Set in the summer of 1953, Esther drifted from one possibility of her future to another, before scrapping her dream of authorship and shifting her dreams to suicide.

In my opinion, I think Esther’s shift from a confused 20-something woman to suicide is a steep cliff dive downward. Still, much like Esther’s dying fig tree analogy, each rotting fig symbolic of choices, my tarot reading reminded me that grieving dying figs is a waste of time if you do not like figs.

The tarot reading revealed something that I had an inkling of for a long time: I love accomplishments more than anything else.

At a young age, much younger than I am now, I realized that I didn’t have to work exceptionally hard for academic grandeur — the school would give you a little, shiny certificate just because you had perfect attendance. Jokes on them though because I’d puke in the bushes in front of Thunder Bay in the mornings to avoid being sent home.

Education had well defined goals that I did not have to think too awfully about. At any given semester in college, you’d have five or six professors lecturing you as to how you should strive for success. They’d give you a packet of assignments and reading materials. You’d complete them in a timely manner and they’d give you a grade and a pat on the back. Then you’d repeat the same routine the next semester. Then the semester after that.

Existing in academia was like living in a self-sustaining terrarium: it’s pretty to look at, but the living organisms and creatures within cannot break away from the four walls — or at least, those organisms and creatures are told they should not try or else they will live a life of mediocrity.

Their growth is stunted by the container, and those organisms are dependent on the caretaker — the academic institution to whom they sell their soul.

I believed that education was my only guiding north star in life because it came easy to me. I seemed to always have the right answers — most of the time. I had an uncanny ability to remember obscure facts — at parties my mother would nudge me and I’d recite a script from a history documentary I had watched the night prior.

Everyone’s eyes would get big and I’d be called a “walking encyclopedia.”

When I didn’t have the right answers, I knew how to work twice as hard as those around me, which in most cases was more impressive to my teachers and professors than the grades I held.

Despite whatever success I gained in academics, this question remains: What is the point of watching figs falling to their death if you don’t care for figs? Where do you even find a fig tree? Have you ever tasted a fig? I have not — actually, I might have had fig jam, with soft brie, once for a Christmas snack three years ago. I think it tasted alright …

Reader, I understand you probably don’t care about figs, Plath, or tarot. Regardless, you can take something from this story which is universal: don’t waste the precious present chasing a future that you haven’t chosen for yourself.