The first time I came across the idea that some people can see things most others cannot was when I was eleven or twelve.

At the time, I was taking an extracurricular class. I didn't know anyone there, so I picked a random corner and sat down by myself. One day, a girl I had never met before sat beside me. We talked for a few days and gradually became friends. Then one day, very casually, she said something that caught my attention: “Do you believe I can figure out a lot of things?” She didn't say it in a mysterious or dramatic way. She was just a kid, showing off a little, talking about how she seemed to know things other people didn't.

One day, I happened to mention her to a friend. Out of curiosity, we decided to see what she meant. And to be fair, she got a surprising number of things right. At the time, though, I didn't think much of it. Children always have plenty of other things on their minds. The experience passed through my life like a breeze across water, leaving a few ripples behind before disappearing completely. A few classes later, I stopped going, and we never saw each other again. I've long since forgotten even what her name was, and I never thought to ask which school she went to.

Many years later, I came to understand that some things do not stop existing simply because we choose not to look at them.

When I was in middle school, several books about psychology suddenly appeared on the bookshelf at home. I had no idea who bought them, and I wasn't interested in reading them. The covers weren't appealing, the titles sounded boring, and I would have happily ignored them. But there were no smartphones back then, and eventually boredom won. To my surprise, they were fascinating. Each chapter told the story of a person—what they had been through, what was happening inside their mind, and what could be learned from it. I read one book after another, finishing seven or eight of them in a row. After reading book after book, I found myself wondering: What if I became a therapist someday? Later, I looked into the profession more seriously and realized it wasn't nearly as simple as I had imagined, so I let the idea go. But somehow, that seed never really died.

Then, years later, I went through a breakup. Around that time, I stumbled across collective tarot readings online and started watching them every day. I would even fall asleep listening to them. I depended on them for a while, and I genuinely believed in them. Maybe it was because those readings seemed to reach me exactly when I was falling apart.

One day, I came across someone showing a miniature tarot deck online. The cards were tiny—about the length of two finger joints. Small enough to carry anywhere. They were adorable. The price wasn't insignificant for me at the time, but for some reason, I bought them anyway. Maybe I happened to have a little extra money. Or maybe I simply needed something I could hold on to.

When the deck arrived, I barely used it. It sat there untouched for quite a while. The day I finally started using it wasn't because I wanted to learn tarot. It was because I missed someone. And I had already reached the point where collective readings were no longer enough. So I started pulling cards for myself every day, asking the same questions over and over again, trying to understand everything I could about that person. Somewhere in all that repetition, the cards began to settle into my mind.

To be honest, familiar as I became with them, there were still plenty of cards whose textbook meanings I couldn't have explained to you. I read them by instinct. I would turn over a card, look at the image, and pay attention to what it seemed to be trying to tell me. Only much later did I realize that this wasn't a skill built on memorization. It was something more intuitive than that. In my hands, tarot was never a tool. It was a conversation.

One day, while chatting in a large online community, the conversation happened to turn to tarot. I mentioned that I knew a little about it. I had read for myself before, but I had never read for anyone else. There was one person I got along with particularly well, and over time we became friends. He told me that some people he knew were interested in tarot too, and asked whether I'd be willing to do a few free readings for them.

The first time I ever read cards for a stranger, I was still using that tiny little deck. I even asked beforehand: “The cards I use are really small. You don't mind, do you?”

Back then, I could spend an entire hour talking through just three cards. I wanted to explain every card from every angle I could see. And when the reading was over, I would often stay and talk with the person for a while longer. Because I knew better than most that sometimes people are not really looking for answers. Sometimes they simply need someone willing to sit with them and listen.

Later, I bought my first full-sized Rider–Waite deck. It wasn't a matter of finally getting a better deck. It was the moment I realized that I wanted to take this seriously.

I've never treated it as something that needed to grow as quickly as possible, nor as a career that had to reach a particular milestone. I have a life outside of tarot, and new experiences of my own. There have been long stretches of time when I didn't offer readings at all. But I never truly walked away from it. I've simply kept learning, little by little, moving forward little by little, and deepening my understanding of it a little more each year.

Later, out of curiosity, I looked into my birth chart. To my surprise, it seemed to have been saying the same thing all along: that I was naturally suited to work centered around communication, guidance, and understanding people. I've always been talkative. And my intuition has often allowed me to pick up on what people are thinking before they put it into words.

The psychology books I read as a child. The thousands of cards I pulled after my heartbreak. Every conversation I've had with strangers while helping them work through their problems. Spread across more than a decade, each of those moments seemed accidental on its own. But looking back now, they all seem to point in the same direction.

Maybe I wasn't just an ordinary person who happened to come across tarot. Maybe I was always on my way here. Looking back, the signs seem almost impossible to miss. It started with a passing comment from a girl I met when I was eleven, and somehow every road after that led in the same direction. It just took me a long time to understand what I was being shown.

And today, I'm still doing this work. I've never felt the need to rush, nor have I ever felt the need to take on more clients than I can truly hold space for. Because over the years, no card I've turned with care and no story I've listened to with sincerity has ever been wasted. They have all become part of the weight in my hands, making it a little easier to hold that mirror steady for the people who sit across from me.