Yesterday, I learned that a popular TikTok Tarot reader with 1 M+ followers quit the world of Tarot. She used to go by ‘Alex Reads Tarot’ and was so successful that pop singer/songwriter Hayley Williams name-dropped her in one of her songs. Before yesterday, I had heard of neither.
Alex is young enough to be my daughter, and my heart goes out to her. I watched her farewell video after stumbling across someone’s cynical take on why she quit and how that somehow, supposedly makes her a ‘grifter.’
Watching Alex’s Farewell Video
I didn’t see a grifter in the 10-minute TikTok video. I saw a tense, responsible young woman trying to make the best of a difficult situation. Before me was someone who felt obligated to let the world know about the internal storm of consciousness that was taking place inside her, and that led to the difficult decision to leave the successful place in the Tarot community she had worked so hard to earn.
There were no signs of detachment from reality, and I wouldn’t want to attempt to diagnose her with religious trauma. Needless to say, for me, it brought plenty of memories of my two major religious trauma relapses.
Watching Alex’s video also forced me to confront an uncomfortable memory about myself.
Why I Judged Doreen Virtue
In 2017, when Doreen Virtue announced that she had become a fundamentalist Christian and denounced Tarot, I judged her harshly. Like many others in the spiritual community, I assumed I knew what had happened. I believed she had succumbed to fear, traded freedom for dogma, and perhaps found a lucrative new audience.
When I Walked Away from Tarot
Then, three years later, around the time of my Chiron return, I found myself walking through a remarkably similar door.
Not because I had suddenly become irrational. Not because I wanted to deceive anyone. And certainly not because I stopped seeking the truth.
I was carrying unresolved religious trauma that I didn’t yet understand. When it resurfaced, it demanded to be faced. Looking back, I can see that stepping away from Tarot for a season was part of that process. At the time, however, it felt like the only faithful thing I could do.
That experience permanently changed the way I think about other people’s spiritual journeys.
The Spiritual Community Needs More Grace
Today, I have no idea whether Alex’s decision will last six months, six years or a lifetime. Nor do I need to know. What I do know is that none of us has access to another person’s inner world.
We see an announcement.
Nor do we see the years of wrestling that came before it.
We see a ten-minute video.
We don’t see the sleepless nights, the private prayers, the fears, the hopes, the conversations that were never filmed, or the questions that refused to leave.
Yet social media encourages us to fill in all those blanks. Within hours, people were confidently declaring that Alex was either genuinely saved or cynically grifting.
Perhaps she is neither.
Perhaps she is simply a human being responding honestly to where her conscience has led her today.
Life Has a Way of Humbling Our Certainties
If my own journey has taught me anything, it is that spiritual life rarely unfolds in a straight line.
Only when I stopped judging myself for the path I had taken did something unexpected happen. The rigid either-or thinking that had trapped me for so long began to dissolve. I discovered that the deepest truths in my own life weren’t asking me to choose between one world and another. They were inviting me into a both-and spacious enough to hold Christ, Tarot, contemplation, discernment and mystery without forcing any of them into a false opposition.
That doesn’t mean everyone will arrive at the same place I have.
Nor should they.
But perhaps, as a spiritual community, we could become a little slower to pronounce verdicts on one another’s journeys. The grace we withhold from others today may be the very grace we find ourselves desperately needing tomorrow.
Life has a remarkable way of humbling our certainties.
Mine certainly did.
