Tarot Stacks 008
protagonist energy...
Hello Darlings,
All of this living has made me nostalgic. I’m a perimenopausal woman turning 50 next year having made the strategic decision to return to everything I loved most when I was a teenager. Fifteen-year-old me, sprawled on her bedroom floor surrounded by paperbacks and notebooks, would take one look at present-day me — writing all damn day, playing with tarot cards, generally answering to no one — and decide we are an absolute badass.
I think she’d be really fucking pleased with us.
Nostalgia, though. Nostalgia is sneaky. It doesn’t always come from where you expect. Sometimes it’s a smell. Sometimes it’s a song you forgot you knew every word to. And sometimes — last week, for example — it comes from unpacking a haul of used decks and finding something that isn’t rare, isn’t a collector’s piece, and absolutely stopped me cold anyway. Rubberbanded haphazardly to its little booklet, looking like nothing special but somehow soooooo intensely familiar. That red line with white text stretched across it — I understood it viscerally before my brain caught up.
*Choose Your Own Adventure: The Tarot Deck Guidebook.*
Choose Your Own Adventure books were a particular kind of magic. The story bent depending on which page you turned to next. One reader ended up exploring a haunted mansion. Another ended up at the bottom of the ocean. A third died in the first ten pages because of a single bad decision involving a door. (Everyone died a lot. It was part of the deal.) Before the internet was in everyone’s pocket, before every story had a search bar and a sequel and a fan wiki, the idea that a *book* could branch — that the words on the page could rearrange themselves based on something *you* did — felt like sorcery. Most stories ran on rails. These ones handed you the wheel. Honestly the closest thing my generation had to Jumanji, just with significantly less Robin Williams.
I peeked ahead. Of course I peeked ahead. I marked pages with my fingers so I could go back and try a different door if I died. I needed to see all the doors. I needed to know what was behind every single one before I committed to the one I was going to walk through. Tell me that is not the most on-brand thing you have ever heard about me…
I had to sit down. I had to sit with it for a full minute. Some objects are time machines. This one had me back at a Scholastic book fair, hovering over a folding table, trying to decide which adventure I was going to live in next like the choice was the most important thing in the world. Because at the time, it was.
Here’s the thing I’ve come around to: tarot is the exact same kind of branching story. The cards lay out the doors. You are always the one turning the page. You are always — *always* — the protagonist of the book. And if last week taught me anything, it is that you can always, always go back and choose differently.
So that’s what we’re doing this week. A spread for the choosers, the page-peekers, and the kids who needed to know what was behind every single door before turning the knob.
The Layout…
This is a brand new spread, invented just for this issue. No pedigree, no tradition — just the right shape for the theme.
Five cards. A branching path.
Card 1 at the top. Cards 2 and 3 fanning out below it like a fork in the road. Card 4 off to the side — the one you almost didn’t pull. Card 5 at the bottom, where all roads eventually land.
The Reading…
Card 1 — You are the protagonist.
Where do you actually stand right now, stripped of the story you’ve been telling about it?
Card 2 — Turn to page 47.
The path your head is pushing you toward.
Card 3 — Turn to page 112.
The path your gut has been quietly lobbying for.
Card 4 — The page you keep skipping.
What you’re avoiding choosing entirely.
Card 5 — The ending you’re writing toward.
Regardless of which page you turn to — what story are you in?
Ask yourself: have you been peeking ahead? And if you already know how you want this to end, what’s stopping you from just turning to that page…
I Feel Icky About Self Promotion But…
Last time I told you I wanted to do this every day. I want to revise that statement: I am doing this every week. The physical part of this — pulling the card for a specific person, sitting with it, wrapping it, addressing it, walking it to the mailbox — has quietly taken over a corner of my life and I am letting it. It’s becoming consuming in the most beautiful way. It’s the kind of work that makes the whole rest of the day feel like it had a point.
To everyone who has subscribed at the paid tier: I want to tell you that you have given me something I didn’t know I was hungry for. You let me make a small ritual out of an ordinary day. I think about you when I shuffle. I hold your card for a beat longer than I need to. I hope it lands in your hands the way it left mine — small, deliberate, and meant for you.
If you’d like a card pulled and mailed to you each month, the paid tier is still open and I will absolutely do a small private celebration when a new name shows up. And no, “small private celebration” is not a euphemism. I do in fact do a little dance…
The Deck…
This week’s spread was pulled from *The Choose Your Own Adventure Tarot Deck* — a 78-card deck with a hefty 128-page guidebook, published by Chooseco in 2024, with art by Brian Anderson. The guidebook was written by Rana Tahir, a longtime tarot reader who lives right here in my hometown Portland. Local! I love it.
Rana has also written two actual Choose Your Own Adventure novels: one based on the life of WWII resistance agent Noor Inayat Khan, and one set in the fourth season of Stranger Things. Which is to say: this is a tarot guidebook by someone who has spent real time inside the mechanics of branching stories, and it shows.
Find Rana at rana-tahir.com (https://rana-tahir.com/) and on Instagram at @readingrana (https://www.instagram.com/readingrana/).
That’s it…
Whatever you’re standing in front of this week — whatever door, whatever page, whatever decision you’ve been peeking ahead at — this is me telling you to turn to page 47.
And then, if you feel like it, tell me what’s there.
Love love love,
Cami