Tarot is a system of opposites.
It’s heteronormative and queer. It’s rebellious and traditional. It’s cis and trans. 9-5 and freelance. Neurotypical and neurodivergent. One reader with one deck might look at the Lovers card and talk about finding love, sex, and romance. A different reader with another deck might take the same card and talk about the importance of finding yourself and building platonic friendships. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the Hierophant is depicted with the stern figure of the Pope. In the Linestrider deck, the Hierophant card shows the image of a peaceful brown bear.
I think of my readings as conversations between myself, the querent, and the deck, so of course my readings have a flavour of queerness and neurodiversity, because that’s who I am, and those are inextricable parts of my identity. I love finding unexpected ways to “spice” the cards with my autism, just like many other brilliant writers have queered the cards to read the Fool’s Journey through their authentic lens.
So here we go: three cards that, for me, hold particularly neurospicy truths.
To me, the Magician screams “special interests”. This is a card about knowledge and data you’ve worked hard to attain. It’s about research, spending time with your subject, and that thrill of finding secret pockets of knowledge that only comes with time and dedication. If that doesn’t describe thirteen-year-old me’s obsession with Sherlock Holmes, I don’t know what does.
But the Magician isn’t just about knowledge for knowledge’s sake. This card shows a person who uses their knowledge to find joy and meaning in this complicated world. Traditional decks will often show the Magician with one hand raised up to the sky, to show their connection to the universe and the realm of the mind, and the other hand pointed down at the earth, to show how they are still rooted in the mundane. This isn’t a stuffy intellectual who doesn’t engage with reality, this is someone who uses their special interests to enjoy their world and their passage through it.
To return to my thirteen-year-old self, I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, which led me to write Sherlock Holmes fanfiction, and then my own original fiction, which sparked a passion for writing that I turned into a marketable skill. I researched the greater world outside 221B Baker Street and gained another interest in the Victorian era of British history, which was not only great fun, but which opened my eyes to the Victorian thoughts and ideals that still shape our modern world, which helped change my politics, deconstruct my religious trauma, and face many of the unconscious biases that I didn’t realise I had.
All that from a dude with a pipe and a funny hat.
(And, yes, I am of course aware that Doyle never specifies that Holmes wore a deerstalker, and it would in fact have been weird for a gentleman in the city to wear a hat designed for country excursions, but Sidney Paget’s illustrations where he is wearing the deerstalker are extremely iconic, so don’t let my commitment to bathos undermine my point.)
The Five of Pentacles is the sickness card, and for me this is where my reality as an autistic person clashes with the reality of existing (forget thriving, just existing) in a capitalist world. This card is about my chronic tiredness, my lack of spoons, my anxiety and depression, my awkwardness, my constant fear that I’m doing something wrong, that I’m misreading the room, that I’m not getting the obvious subtext. It’s the nagging, ever-present feeling that I’m out of step with everyone around me. It’s the panic of meeting new people and going into new situations. It’s every way in which my autism makes life hard for me.
But what comes with sickness? In an ideal world, it would be recuperative care; and if no one will do that for me, then I must do it for myself. This card is a call to softness, to understanding, to gentleness with myself. Sickness and disability are reminders that everyone’s reality looks different. What may come easily to one person may be an insurmountable struggle to another. And while this card reminds us to extend empathy to those around us – insert here that Instagrammable quote about everyone fighting invisible battles – it also pushes us to be understanding with ourselves.
Comparison is the thief of joy for everyone, but it’s particularly potent when a disabled person measures themselves against the able-bodied.
Death is change, both literally and figuratively. As a tarot card, it signifies a transformation that’s often painful, but which is ultimately for the greater good. I can say all that intellectually, but then I remember the dreadful, heart-pounding panic that flared inside me that time my parents decided to redecorate the hall, and it’s clear that often change is a kind of death.
But surely this doesn’t make sense, because, as my partner will often point out in loving exasperation, I am incapable of leaving my own spaces alone. My childhood bedroom changed colour schemes more than any other room in the house, and even now I’m always shifting my shelves, moving my chest of drawers, and rearranging my desk for that perfect layout. There may be a secret hidden reason for this, but to me it seems clear that this is about choice. Religion dominated my childhood, so I never felt like I had any autonomy growing up. When my parents redecorated the hall, it was an extension of that powerlessness. When I move the furniture in my bedroom, the one space where I do have total control, it’s also a result of that.
But what does this mean for Death?
I think this is about boundaries. Boundaries are hard for everyone, but I think they’re particularly thorny for neurodivergent people to navigate because we’re so often pushed beyond our boundaries and told that it’s good for us, or that “this is just how things have to be”. That makes it so hard to reconfigure exactly where those lines in the sand can be safely drawn.
As a child, I found socialising with strangers agonising, but I had to do it because that was what good children did if they didn’t want to make things difficult for everyone else. But nowadays, if I don’t want to socialise with strangers, most of the time I can honour that boundary and just nope out of situations where I feel my anxious, autistic soul shrivelling up inside me.
Death is transformation, and a transformation redraws the shapes and dimensions of who a person is. That includes exploring boundaries, figuring out where you can – and should – stay firm, and where you can bend, shift, and let yourself grow in unexpected ways.
It’s hard to find space in this world as an autistic person. This world isn’t built for people like me, and while that’s often disheartening, I find relief in knowing that there are places where I can carve out a space for my experiences and my reality.
Tarot is a system of opposites, and in the space between those two poles are the niches where people like me can let our truth bloom.