How I Became Superstitious (Against My Better Judgment)

Author’s note: This essay was written in mid-2025. I’ve since moved past some of the questions and conclusions it contains, but I’m publishing it as a record of how I understood these questions at the time.

I have always been a superstitious child. I loved hearing my parents recount the predictions from our family’s trusted fortune-teller and secretly felt excited to grow into the amazing person they saw in me.

As I grew older, my engineering education taught me to distrust everything that couldn’t be proven. How could something like the zodiac determine personality or monthly luck with such a limited cardinality? I decided that anything mythological must be false, and anything spiritual was probably equally ungrounded.

But I was too naive. Over time, I encountered several forms of spiritual and energy work. After experiencing them firsthand, I found myself no longer able to dismiss them so easily. Why did I walk into a Reiki session feeling desperate, ready for everything to just stop, and walk out feeling at peace? How could a single therapy session where I daydreamed and tapped my chest for half an hour leave me suddenly free from a relationship that had haunted me for years? The shifts felt too real, too immediate, too effective to write off as placebo. I began to wonder if something was happening beneath conscious reasoning, somehow affecting everything that exists.

One time, when I was facing a difficult career decision, a friend pointed me to a tarot reader she always uses, insisting that she was born to do this. I went in deeply skeptical and left unsettled—she seemed to describe my biggest fears around the future of each option with uncomfortable precision, even when I thought I gave no hints about any of them. It felt too relevant to dismiss outright. What surprised me more was what happened later. About half a year after I’d made my choice, I looked back at what she had said about the different paths. Her description of what my situation would be like if I picked the path I did pick was so accurate that I couldn’t have found better words for it myself.

I found myself going back to the same tarot reader when I faced more difficult decisions. The engineering part of my brain never fully quieted down. It kept asking: How can you believe in this? Why would you hand over your decisions to a deck of cards? What about free will? Part of me wondered whether I was outsourcing responsibility—hoping that fate could decide for me, so I wouldn’t have to live with the consequences.

Eventually, I made peace with it. I realized that I wasn’t blindly following the tarot reader’s “recommendations”. I was listening to what she said and noticing what became clearer to me as a result. The certainty of the reading quieted the loudest, most argumentative voice in my head for another voice to be heard—the feelings that I have carefully avoided naming.

You might ask couldn’t I do the same through journaling or reflection? Maybe. But I’ve rarely succeeded that way. My rational mind is too good at arguing against my own intuition. A tarot reading presents things with confidence and finality, forcing shape onto feelings and possibilities that logic alone tends to dissolve.

To make this more concrete, here are a few examples. It forces me to confront emotions I usually rationalize away. Once, while debating whether to take an offer from a company whose negotiation process left me stressed and confused, my brain kept telling me this was just the persistence a company needs to succeed, even as my gut felt uneasy. The reading surfaced themes of hidden motives. Whether or not that was “true,” it gave language to a discomfort I had carefully avoided naming, because it felt too harsh and too subjective to trust.

It also brings forward things I’ve chosen to ignore simply because I don’t know their probabilities. Sometimes the cards take a small worry I mention in passing—like doubts about a product direction—and present it as a certainty. That jolt when hearing a stranger say my biggest fear out loud forces me to ask whether I’ve been minimizing something that matters simply because I can’t measure it.

Even more, it shifts my thinking from better-or-worse to what I actually want. A reading once compared two paths: staying in a role that was nurturing but not empowering, or moving to a place that would be exhausting and draining but offer more space for growth. Neither was clearly better; each reflected a different version of what I valued. The cards didn’t tell me what to do—they asked which story I wanted to live.

I’ve come to realize that I use tarot not to predict the future, but to point out parts of myself I might otherwise ignore.

At the end of the day, even if you know how exactly things will play out on each path, you’d still have to choose what direction you want your life to take.