I don't recall how I got into Tarot reading, I received my first reading from a friend over the summer in Manhattan in my tiny dorm room in the middle of night, channeling all sorts of suppressed feelings of love and despair that were brought to the surface in a basic Celtic cross spread, that is the five card spread in a tarot reading.

I had always thought of the tarot as some mystical role only women on the boardwalk with psychic shops were allowed to play, that they had sold a part of their soul in Camden and made it difficult for pedestrians like myself to not glance twice and get ripped off on a reading. This, however, was simply not true. I was amazed at the accuracy it could attain in my personal life and the life of my friends as they received their own readings from my friend, the reader's beautiful ornamented deck.

I wanted to dabble in the dark arts and have my own tarot but somewhere along the grapevine I had heard that you never purchase your first deck. It had to be a gift. So I respected the tradition and stayed put until September when I was gifted my first deck of cards. I was excited but uneducated. There are 78 cards in a deck of tarot and each has it's own specific meaning: 22 major arcana cards and 56 minor arcana, modeled after the traditional playing cards, divided up between the wands, the swords, the cups, and coins. So you can imagine it will take a while before you are a true Bruja in the art of tarot.

I moved into my first apartment in Bushwick and gathered the girls up for readings in the middle of the night with wine and heavy hearts. One of my roommates challenged me to read the cards simply by looking at the positions of the figures instead of flipping through the little yellow booklet that came with the deck. She herself knew how to read tarot and really directed me to look further into the cards.

Months passed, I set sail for the ancient city of Rome for a semester and met another girl who read the tarot cards, she had been doing readings for over six years and was very equipped in telling you exactly what the cards say and how it correlates to your own life. With all of these experiences and a growing fascination with astrology and other cosmic signs the universe was rolling towards me, I thought: am I going to end up as one of those people who judges a person solely off of their zodiac sign?

"Like Becky, you are such a Gemini it's your rising sign after all ..."

But that was never my intention. Over the course of a year, I developed an interest in tarot, which for me was like reading a non-objective self-help book that I didn't feel bad about picking up at the bookstore.

This inevitably brought an interest into the zodiac signs and I even came across a rose quartz crystal at the flea market that I like to wear when I am down.

An old 90's documentary on tarot cards, narrated by Christopher Lee (the OG Dracula) informed me that The Fool was representative of the human being in a deck and with every numbered card, it cycles from the magician to the empress to the high priestess and so on. So, to the sun, the moon and the stars, we start off as fools and we end up as emperors, with or without the tarot. The cards do tell you where you stand and it's up to you if you want to listen.