Man, let me tell you something. I’ve been there. We all have. That agonizing wait. You know the one. You just had some kind of messy split, maybe a fight, maybe a ghosting, and your fingers are literally aching to check your phone every five seconds, hoping that notification bubble pops up with his name on it.
I was such a wreck for months. I would go through these massive cycles of hope and dread. I’d be checking his social media, then blocking him, then unblocking him at 3 AM. It was pathetic, honestly, but I couldn’t stop myself. My mind kept trying to solve the puzzle: Did he care? Was it over for real? Because if I knew the future, I could stop worrying now, right?
I swear, for three solid weeks last year, my main hobby was Googling variations of “Will he contact me again tarot free.” I was hitting every spammy website, refreshing pages, looking for that one sweet confirmation. I clicked on so many misleading thumbnails. I put in my name, his name, my dog’s name—anything that promised a definitive answer. I was desperate for some kind of sign from the universe that said, “Just hang in there, sweetie, he’s coming back on Tuesday.”
And what did I get? Just confusion. Total chaos.
One site pulls The World—which sounds great, like closure or completion. Hope! Another pulls the Eight of Swords—which is totally messed up, talking about feeling trapped and unable to move. Dread! A third pulls, like, the Knight of Cups reversed, which just screams “flakey emotional mess who isn’t worth your time.” I’d spend hours trying to reconcile these random results. Was the Knight of Cups the reason The World was coming? Was I trapped until The World happened? It was exhausting trying to fit my messy reality into some random three-card spread generated by an algorithm.
I kept falling into the same trap. If the reading was positive, I was relieved but still frozen, waiting for the prophecy to fulfill itself. I’d put my life on hold, just waiting for that text that the cards promised. If it was negative, I felt destroyed and validated my victimhood, spending the day crying and eating takeout because, well, the tarot said it was pointless anyway.
I finally hit a wall about six months into this madness. I was sitting at my kitchen table, and one reading gave me something genuinely cryptic, like “The Hermit in the past position, Judgement in the future, with the central card being the Four of Wands.” I stared at that screen, and I swear, I just laughed—a huge, hollow laugh. What the actual hell did that mean for whether Gary was going to text me back about that stupid charger I left at his place? It hit me then: I wasn’t looking for prophecy; I was looking for permission to stop hurting and permission to stop acting. I was letting some random website dictate my entire emotional state.
The Practice: Reclaiming the Power from the Free Reading
This is where the real work started, and this is the practice I want to share, because it actually works to stop the obsession. The goal shifted from trying to predict him to trying to fix me.
- Step 1: The Immediate Re-frame. The second I felt the urge to check a tarot site or re-read that confusing free spread, I had to stop and physically move. I walked into a different room, put my phone on airplane mode, and wrote down exactly what I was hoping the reading would say. Not what the cards said, but what I wanted them to say. This revealed my true fear, which was usually not losing him, but losing my own sense of control.
- Step 2: Ban the Ambiguity Cycle. I realized I was using the ambiguity of the cards (The Lovers reversed, for instance, which means either conflict or freedom) to keep the hope alive. So I instituted a ban: After getting a free result, I was only allowed to interpret the card in terms of what I must let go of. If I pulled The Star, I didn’t interpret it as hope for reconciliation; I interpreted it as hope for my own independent future. It forced me to detach.
- Step 3: Define “Contact” on My Terms. I stopped letting the reading define success. Does “contact” mean a heartfelt apology? Or just a random emoji? I sat down and defined the only contact I would accept as meaningful. For me, it was “nothing short of a clear commitment to talk things out face-to-face.” That way, the small, breadcrumb-y contacts that ruin your peace—like a random “lol” on an old photo—don’t count. They are irrelevant noise.
- Step 4: The Reality Check Action Plan. This is the most crucial step. Instead of interpreting the card for the future, I started interpreting it for my present action. Let’s take that common result, The Tower. Everyone freaks out when they pull The Tower in a relationship reading. But when you get The Tower for the “Will he contact me” question, it doesn’t mean a brick will fall on your head. It means the structure you built—the one where you desperately wait for him—needs to collapse so you can build something real. The actionable step is: You tear down the structure of waiting. You change your schedule. You block him (maybe for real this time). You cancel plans that were dependent on him.
The difference was immediate. When I shifted the focus from “Will he contact me?” to “What am I doing right now that makes me happy regardless?”, the free tarot results stopped holding power over me. The cards became background noise. The reading isn’t about him; it’s always about you.
Look, I still pull cards sometimes for fun. But now, when I get a weird, contradictory free reading, I don’t obsess over it. I treat it like a snapshot of my current anxiety, not a picture of the future. If you’re stuck in this cycle, stop asking the internet and start asking yourself: “What practical, messy thing can I do today to make his eventual non-contact irrelevant?” Do that. That’s the real magic.
