When I pull tarot, I want suggestions more than answers. And sometimes, when I’m feeling blue or defeated, I want the deck to hand me a silver lining. I was on the hunt for a good mood the other morning when I pulled the Six of Cups. It’s a card that sometimes represents nostalgia, innocence, and lighthearted memories of youth.
When the tarot deck says “consider this,” I’ll sit with it. It’s a game of intuition—just like flipping a coin to see if you should or should’t go to the party. You already know the answer. And sometimes the card fits so snugly inside of your narrative.
Like the Six of Cups, the card of teenage joy. There she goes floating to the surface just as I sat thinking about the things we give up as adults. Not just the sweet memories, like long summers, but the grungy ones. The things that feel cinematic but not necessarily glamorous—making out in cars, lying about your whereabouts, congregating in filthy warehouses because there’s no place else to hang.
The cards keep telling me that I need to chill the fuck out and have some fun. I’m an over-thinker obsessed with the notion of productivity. What if I just let myself be an irresponsible teenage goof for a day?
One recent night I sat in my grown-up living room with a friend. It was the perfect opportunity to act on my youthful impulses. She brought over some weed, and for the first time in a long while we partook in the ritual of sharing a bowl. This alone feels very Six of Cups. Weed in adulthood is mostly vaping alone for calmer nerves and better sleep. It’s more about self-regulation and less about being bad with your friends, the way it was when I was young.
We joked about hiding the weed should Jake come home suddenly, then reminisced about the need to keep weed hidden. Refined adults who smoke weed keep it tucked away in proud boxes like cigars, pulling it out with dignity. It enters the room like a bottle of wine, a modest ingredient for responsible debauchery. The things that felt like edge and rebellion as teenagers can become standard routine as adults. Where’s the fun in that?
In all the excitement of performative misbehaving, we both smoked too much. We sat stoned and giggling, floating our way through conversation about our life that week, recognizing the ways that adulthood had somehow gotten so grown-up.
“Jake wants to get a Costco membership,” I said, wide-eyed. “I thought we could do it ironically, until I realize we’re actually just thirty-somethings getting a Costco membership. No way around it.”
Being a grown-up never ceases to be funny. I’m regularly amused to find myself entirely responsible for my own life. The way one is required to call a pharmacist or insurance agency and speak in a serious voice… tell me you’ve never made a funny face at yourself during a call like this, just to make sure you’re still you.
Later in our stoned conversation we sat sipping Spindrift from vintage glasses and listing all the things that we forgot about being teenagers. It was sweet to remember the tacky ways you have to tiptoe around the rules, and to then miss those tacky habits and think about whether or not they belong in our adult lives from time to time. We don’t have sex in cars anymore because don’t have to. But would that be fun?
Whatever your answer to the last question, the lesson remains that the Six of Cups wants us to rediscover youth, whatever that looks like for you. I’m reminded of S3E15 of Sex and the City, the one where Carrie and her comic-loving boyfriend get stoned on his parents’ patio and spill fried chicken everywhere. She loves it, she’s laughing, she’s living. And though she can’t live like that forever, it was just what she needed.
“In the end, I decided I was definitely 34 going on 35, but in a city like New York with its pace and pressures, sometimes it's important to have a 13-year-old moment, to remember a simpler time when the best thing in life was just hanging out, listening to records, and having fun with your friends, in your very own apartment.”