More Useful Than You Think

I think the Tarot is vastly underrated as a tool for dealing with depression. After all, the most popular form of therapy right now for depression is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in which you learn not what deep childhood trauma influenced your depression but how your day-to-day thinking influences your depression. It's about spotting irrational thought patterns and changing them, heading off a bout of depression at the pass, as it were.

Take me. I interviewed for a job on the first of October, and I haven't heard back from them yet. I know it's a city position and city governments are notoriously slow, but I get a little neurotic about waiting to hear back from people about things like this, plus my new part-time job is asking if they can move me on to the next level of training. I decided that if I hadn't heard from them by Friday afternoon, I'd call and see what was up.


And then I started thinking. The whole application process has been a little weird, because I submitted my application just before the city turned over their application submission software, so I don't show up on the website, even though they not only received my application, they interviewed me. What if, I thought, they sent out rejection letters via that software, and I just haven't gotten it yet? What if, horror of horrors, they sent out acceptance letters via that software, and I haven't gotten it?


This is clearly insane. No one would do that. But I sat there last night in front of my loom, thinking these thoughts, and I could feel my chances of sleep ebbing away. And then I glanced over at my altar, where I'd drawn a trio of Tarot cards a few days ago, as I was trying to decide what to do about November when I didn't know if I'd be moving or not. (The Knight of Swords; the Seven of Pentacles, reversed; and the Three of Cups. Encouraging, to say the least.) And I cut the deck halfway through and found The Hierophant staring back at me. 


Does it get a lot more obvious than that? Let the goddamn bureaucracy do its thing, woman, and stop worrying about it. And you know, I did. I went to bed and have decided to stick with my plan of calling Friday rather than freaking out and calling today. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in action, with a little assistance. 


Do I think the Tarot really knows what's going on, or is it just a convenient way of externalizing my own internal processes? Hell if I know. I've never been good at "yes, but what do you believe reeealy happens?" questions, because I don't particularly care. What "really" happens is such a weird question anyway -- even science isn't particularly good at it, for all they thought Newtonian Motion was an accurate description of the universe for so long, and I am far from the Isaac Newton of magick. What I know is the Tarot is a useful little thing, sometimes a useful big thing, and it helps to make me less crazy. That's good enough for me.