The Advice That Felt Like A Joke
Okay, so let’s talk about receiving advice that just makes you want to throw your hands up. You ask the universe, or whatever you want to call it, for a clear path forward, something concrete, and what do you pull? The Page of Cups. Seriously. I remember staring at that card, half expecting it to giggle at me.
I was in a mess. A total mess, personally and professionally. Everything I touched felt dry. I needed guidance on whether I should blow up my current structure—quit the job I hated but paid the bills, or finally have that brutal conversation with my family I’d been avoiding for months. I didn’t need some dreamy kid holding a fish in a cup; I needed a strategy. I needed the Knight of Swords, or maybe the Hierophant, telling me what rules to follow.
I spent three days trying to intellectually dissect the Page of Cups. I Googled every interpretation: new emotional messages, childlike wonder, intuition, artistic endeavors. I wrote out flowcharts. I tried to map my logical dilemmas onto its meaning. It felt like trying to fix a broken car engine by painting the fender pink. It made zero sense in the context of my very real, very adult problems. I just kept pushing it away, thinking, “This is too soft. This is useless.”
Hitting the Wall and The Unsolicited Email
My resistance was costing me. I wasn’t sleeping. I was snapping at everyone. The job felt like a slow death, and the unresolved family issue was a ticking time bomb. I was operating purely from logic and fear. I thought if I planned hard enough, I could control the outcome.
Then something happened that finally knocked the structural beams out from under me, forcing me to listen to that annoying, little, advice-giving Page.
I had poured about six months of my life into a side project, a software tool that I was certain would be my escape route. It was my practical solution to all my problems. I launched it, poured my last bit of marketing money into it, and waited for the validation. Crickets. Silence. Not only did it not sell, but the first feedback email I received wasn’t a bug report or a feature request. It was just one sentence:
“It’s technically fine, but where is the soul?”
I remember sitting there, staring at that screen. It hit me like a physical punch. Where is the soul? That question wasn’t about the software; it was about me. It was the universe repeating the Page of Cups message, just louder and meaner. My entire logical plan, my escape route, was bankrupt because I hadn’t invested any genuine feeling into it. I had been too busy calculating.
The Messy, Ugly Action
I realized I had to stop trying to be the CEO of my feelings and start being the five-year-old in the room. The Page is about vulnerability and imagination. My logical side had failed me spectacularly, so I decided to pivot entirely to the emotional side, even though it felt totally unprofessional and ridiculous.
Here’s what I did. This is the practice I logged:
- I grabbed a cheap notebook, not my fancy, structured journal. I made a rule: no censoring. No worrying about grammar or coherence. I just started dumping every ugly, scared, angry emotion about the job and the family situation onto the page. I let myself sound childish and irrational. I didn’t try to find a solution; I just validated the feeling.
- I decided to initiate the scary family conversation, but with a new approach. Instead of presenting facts and solutions (my usual power-play move), I went in stating only how their actions made me feel. I used phrases like, “When X happened, I felt incredibly small,” or, “My fear is that Y means Z.” It was brutal. I cried. They cried. It was a total mess, completely devoid of the usual adult pretense.
- I started looking for small, unnecessary acts of creativity. I’m not an artist, but the card talks about imagination. I decided I was going to stop researching what other people were doing and just ask myself, “What would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail, and money didn’t matter?” It was purely imaginative play.
Opening the Heart and Letting the Flood In
The immediate result of the conversation was terrible, honestly. We didn’t solve anything right away. It got worse before it got better, because all that repressed emotion was finally out in the open, bubbling up.
But the practice of radical emotional honesty—that was the key. By opening up and validating the messy feelings, I suddenly created space. I wasn’t spending all my energy building walls anymore. I was finally receiving my own emotional message.
What followed was an unexpected flood of clarity, the kind I never would have accessed through spreadsheets. I realized the job wasn’t just stressful; it was actively making me feel worthless. The emotional work I was doing suddenly gave me the internal permission to simply say, “I am done,” without needing a perfect plan B.
I didn’t wait for another job offer. I put in my notice the next week. It felt insane, but for the first time in months, I felt grounded. The Page of Cups wasn’t advice to start painting; it was advice to stop trying to be an adult about things that require a childlike, honest heart. It was telling me to lead with vulnerability, not strategy. And the moment I actually did that messy, ugly work, everything else started to flow. Turns out, the practical solution wasn’t external; it was always about unlocking the emotional information I had locked away.
