I figured that telling fortunes with playing cards would be a cool party trick. And it was! But as I read for different people over time, different combinations of cards would remind me of stories and situations from other readings where I’d seen those cards before. It was when these patterns and connections began falling into place that the resulting insights REALLY started to feel magical.

As an adult, I found my calling in the classroom, teaching English to middle school students by helping them decode stories, unpack symbols, and find meaning in what they read. Tarot cards still fascinated me, and from time to time I would try to pick up the deck that had been sitting on my bookshelf for years. I would sift through the cards while squinting at the text in that little white booklet that was tucked into the box with them, trying to memorize lists of keywords as if I were studying for a huge vocabulary test, but it all kept slipping through my fingers. Even when I managed to remember some keywords, I would still find myself getting stuck whenever I tried to put things together. I realized that there had to be something more to this than just memorizing what each card “means,” because the little white book couldn’t tell me how it all was supposed to come together. Being able to talk about what each card symbolizes is not the same thing as giving a meaningful reading.

That realization — that reading the cards was something else entirely — finally led to a breakthrough: a lot of the strategies that I was teaching students in middle school English classrooms could help me become a more confident reader and storyteller, too! Once I started to approach card reading by thinking about the sequence of cards on my coffee table as if it were a “text” to be read, I began to make sense of them by connecting symbols to specific people, places and experiences that were meaningful to me.

That shift changed everything because it helped me build upon what I already knew to develop a deeper understanding of Tarot as a story that was waiting to be told, not a code to be cracked. Even better, it suggested that all humans can use their own, already-existing cognitive schemata to find those stories using oracle cards, tiles, objects, and yes… Pokemon cards. Any time we access this articulate what makes an image surprising or moving, we are making meaning. And that’s something we already know how to do.