On a hazy evening in that first, frigid week of January, I drag a sage green laundry basket stiff with piles of folded knit sweaters across the concrete jungle of Passy. Past the stairs and benches blocked off by a combination of rope and duct tape, and into my too-warm apartment littered with familiar and forgotten details: a photograph of my best friend and me during a girl’s weekend three summers ago framed in neon orange mosaic glass, an abandoned gum wrapper, and a sticky note dangling precariously off my desk that reads “REVIEW JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE” in hurried blue handwriting. A tableau of a foregone semester and year.
Autumn was a blur: frantic footsteps in and out of the library, a dizzying mix of emails and notes, yellow highlighter over a Contract’s textbook, criminal levels of panic, moots and negotiations, late lunches, and coffee-soaked stress. Although for many of us, it wasn’t our first exercise in maintaining self-confidence, the potency of the pressure was tangible, nonetheless. While reflecting on the past term, my brilliant friend described an internal disillusionment, a blustering dichotomy of having passion and knowledge on a topic but finding her lips sealed, mouth desert-dry, when it was time to share her opinions. Personally, the feeling emerges deep in my chest, freezing me in fear, questioning my credibility and worth, and then leaving me out to dry, overwhelmed, and alone. Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon this article while trying to escape this sticky sentiment—“imposter syndrome.” Maybe you did better than you thought grade-wise but convinced yourself it was a fluke. Or you could be staring down a result you were dreading, even deflatingly expecting, now trying to talk yourself down from spiralling narratives about a seemingly catastrophic future. Yet it’s a new term—better yet, a new year! Happy 2025, by the way!
What could be in store for us? A respiratory itch, definitely unrelated to the smog of January sickness that settled over Osgoode, urges me to reach for my inky violet tarot deck, perched on my kitchen counter like an invitation. Oh, come on—I know what you’re thinking. What kind of cosmic stardust article is this? Fret not. Skepticism of the mystical deck has existed as long as the cards have. My point is not to convert you to the tarot realm—despite knowing exactly what you had for breakfast this morning. Reading my cards brings a source of blushingly soft and muted comfort: figures cooing an abstract sense of guidance. Whether they’re espousing fiction or non-fiction is an uninteresting question. I’m trying to rally myself out of crippling self-doubt and can’t resist a good story. Won’t you join me? Fine, okay—consider your first reading free. Unless it’s wrong—then I’m not liable, and it’s for sure free!
The World (Reversed)
I shuffle the deck, gelled fuchsia nails cutting the cards as they slap against a plethora of rings covering the fingers of my left hand. The first card slips out easily, landing face up on the table. The World: Reversed. Categorized as a Major Arcana, these cards reveal big dramatic truths, prophecies, and key themes, karmic lessons, or necessary advice. In movies, Major Arcana cards are cinematically slapped down on a cloth covered table, smoky incense tailing the edges of the screen, often inciting a gasp, worried expression, or a gulp from the protagonist. In upright position, The World symbolizes harmonic alignment between the internal and external self, glittering achievement and fulfillment. An upside-down card normally represents a bad omen, like a major lesson gone awry or straying from an important path.
Reversed, The World is a shallow breath in cold water: a missed spot draining energy, a disappearance engulfed by Marino blue. It may be your first week in a new location, perhaps a clinic, exchange, or in a seminar teeming with genius upper-year insights. Or you’re looking away from your computer screen just long enough to see a monolithic flash, a hundred electric streaks of ambition, shooting towards the same job. It’s a vulnerable time! While return can be welcome—you could be armoured in iron, shielded against a strong wind of readings—a blinding sunrise reflecting off a snowy, hibernal morning can be disarming. The pale blue hollow of The World is all about an unnerving, expositional, look at the tiny voids lingering across your life. This card is for dreamers, planners, and goal reachers! The opposite of achievement isn’t failure: it’s a continuation of process. Although new stress can bring back old feelings, renewal, and closure don’t have to be temporal or geographical. It can also be a fresh rethinking of your strategy, even getting creative with how you’ll scale the mountain up ahead.
The Queen of Swords and the Four of Cups (Reversed)
What a rush, right? And I haven’t even started lying yet! I’m just kidding. I’d pour you another cup of tea, but you’ve been so engrossed you haven’t noticed I’ve finished the pot already. After what feels like an eternity of shuffling, the second, and third cards slide out together. Fortunes can be just as indecisive as us, although you could argue there’s a silky luxury to taking your time. Our second card is The Queen of Swords. Swords, like wands, cups, pentacles, comprise the Minor Arcana cards representing the intricacies of life through emotions, spirit, finances, or opportunities. They’re indicative of thoughts, studded emblems dotting the process at large. I understand them to be pit stops. They’re communication cards, personifying how emotions and fear shape our internal and external dialogues. Wielding a sword, a mythologically noble protector associated with heart and vigour, can sharpen communication. Who better to symbolize this harnessed power than the Queen? The card depicts her sitting firmly as if exactly who and where she needs to be. Amongst billowing lilac chiffon, she is rooted in matriarchal fury, principled, honest, direct. In twilight, she stands over a fishnet filled with details: she is perceptive and attuned to the world around her.
Alongside her rests another minor card: the Four of Cups, reversed. Overarchingly, the suit of the cups reveals transient emotional states and approaches to life. I associate each tempting chalice with opportunities. Unlike The World, this reversal is less dramatic. Remember what I said about how normally an upside-down card is a bad omen? Upright, the Four of Cups depicts a figure sitting underneath a tree and ignoring a magical hand raising a cup towards him. He stares out in the distance, like the Queen of Swords, yet unlike her forward-thinking clarity, the figure is apathetic to the three cups in front of him. He’s bored! Reversed, this card symbolizes breaking out of apathy: seizing opportunities with renewed passion. Paired with The World (reversed), our guide is no longer fantasizing about the past and approaching it with yearning or nostalgia, rather, like the Queen, he braids a clear perception of his experiences into the present moment. Coupled with the strong ambitions present in The World, the Four of Cups illuminates desire and dreams with a shimmery golden thread, perhaps a rope used to pull yourself into action. The firmness of the Queen symbolizes surety, clarity, and ability to communicate strongly. Reversed, he possesses a buoyant and bouncy consciousness, lime green zest for the grass already blooming in his garden and enthusiastic frenzy for movement. Whether situated by the new year, the cards, or the sun no longer disappearing at 4:00 PM, the Four of Cups vibrates with energy to begin again—but you don’t need anyone’s permission for that.
Leaning back onto two massive clementine orange cushions, I study our results. The cards are such a welcome break from reality that for a moment I forget about elevator pitches in a coffee chat, the pages of my résumé laid out on a café table like a strip of bare skin. I recoil at the thought of this blissful moment ending from an Outlook chime that demands I shift my attention to the steady and persistent thrum of pushing forward, anxiety coating my throat. Like Nosferatu, the imposter’s shadow creeps in dark corners. In my experience, no two readings are alike. Each path is different. At Osgoode, we have the tremendous pleasure of indulging in the soothing collective. In the depths of delirium, it was the imposter hiding in my too-warm apartment who felt alone, not me. I remember the gulps of freezing air during a walk with friends after a long day of studying—a quest to get away from our laptops. Or the loud peals of laughter after finishing an exam and reflecting on a bottomless fact pattern that showed no signs of ending during that terrifying, electric, first read. Confetti covered gift tissue, gaping looks of disbelief exchanged in class, conversations that ended only because time ran out. Whether the arcane deck lays out the future is beside the point. The caricatures represented are not unlike the imposter itself: a persona that forms a narrative. Karmic lessons are transient, we choose the narratives that we see as truth.
I suspect you may even want to know what my mystical cards can procure for you; I’m available Thursdays at dawn, my office is next to the lopsided lawn chair, bobbing on the left side of the pond glittering with rust. I will write my e-transfer in the rocks. What, you didn’t think this was part of my billables? Whistle three times, and I shall appear.
