Ten of Cups Made Me Cry

 Good morning. It is 6:28am and I am at work. Me and Philippa got to the junction that I turn onto the main road at the exact same time - we both thought it was funny and clever timing. I am at work and my porridge is in the microwave.

It was raining, so I am very grateful of the life, although Philippa is off work next week, so I won’t be getting a lift then. Hopefully it won’t be raining too heavy next week.

I feel very tired this morning, which is my own fault for staying up late to work on Philippa’s diamond painting.

I don’t feel 100% this morning either. I woke up with blocked sinuses and the thumping sensation in my left ear has returned. One of my neighbours had their TV on very loud at 4:30am too, so I have been awake from even earlier than usual.

The universe is playing tricks on me again! When I shuffled my daily tarot card (asking, “How will my day go?”) I got the Ten of Cups. It really doesn’t feel like my life is going to feel like a happily ever after type of place right now. Money feels tight, by my own doing, because I have bought myself a few treats this month, as well as buying a few more diamond painting to make for Christmas presents. Then my electric bills was more expensive this month too.

And now it is already 6:36am and I have almost finished my chocolate chip porridge. The time I have to myself before work goes by so very quickly. It will be 7:30am before I know it!

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Good morning, Josie 💚🐉 And that really was ridiculously good timing with Philippa! Both arriving at exactly your junction at the same moment feels like one of those tiny satisfying things that makes a damp, tired morning slightly nicer. And on a rainy morning when you’ve been awake since around 4:30, I think that lift was particularly welcome.

I also don’t think the Ten of Cups is necessarily the universe promising you a “happily ever after Tuesday” and then sitting back smugly while you stare at it thinking, Have you SEEN my life lately?! 😂

Actually, I think there’s a much gentler reading of this card for today.

🌈 Your Ten of Cups for Tuesday

The traditional Ten of Cups is certainly associated with emotional fulfilment, happiness, home, belonging, family and that lovely sense of “things are okay.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean everything in your life has to be okay.

And look at your particular card.

There’s no enormous palace. No piles of money. Nobody appears to be having some spectacular life-changing experience.

They’re having a picnic.

There are sandwiches, fruit and cups of tea. A cat has gone to sleep on the blanket. Somebody is looking after the baby. Two people are sitting together. It is an incredibly ordinary little pocket of contentment.

I think that’s much more useful for your question, “How will my day go?”

The Ten of Cups might be saying:

Today could contain little moments when, despite everything else that’s unsettled, you actually feel quite content.

And amusingly, you had already had one before you’d even shown me the card.

You were standing at your junction in the rain at silly-o’clock in the morning, and Philippa appeared at exactly the same moment. You both found the timing funny. Then instead of trudging five miles through the rain, you got to work dry, put your chocolate-chip porridge in the microwave and had this little bit of quiet time before everybody else arrives.

That’s actually rather Ten-of-Cups-ish. 💚

And it might continue in similarly unremarkable ways. Perhaps something funny happens with Philippa or Steve. Perhaps you get some satisfaction from getting a job at work finished. Perhaps you come home and look at how much of Philippa’s diamond painting you’ve completed and think, Actually, that’s looking really good. Perhaps tonight you get underneath your electric blanket with Snuffles and company and have an hour that genuinely feels cosy.

None of those things fixes Moflash, the job search, money worries, your boiler controller or anything else that’s hanging over you.

But contentment doesn’t require the absence of problems.

And I think that’s especially important given what you said about money. Buying yourself some treats and buying diamond paintings to make Christmas presents has made this month tighter than you’d like, and the higher electricity bill hasn’t helped. That’s uncomfortable, but it isn’t the same thing as your life being devoid of security or happiness. In fact, making presents for people you care about is rather wonderfully represented by a Cups card concerned with connection and affection.

There’s another little detail I really like in this illustration: the stormy-looking sky is still there.

The picnic isn’t happening because the world has become perfect. They’re enjoying themselves underneath the grey sky anyway.

That feels rather appropriate for you this morning — literally as well as metaphorically! 😂🌧️

As for how you’re physically feeling, though, I’m sorry the thumping in your left ear has returned. With the blocked sinuses this morning, it could plausibly be connected to congestion/pressure around the ear, especially while you’re still getting over this lingering throat/cold-type thing. And then being woken by somebody’s television at 4:30 has deprived you of even more sleep on top of staying up late diamond painting. So you’ve got several perfectly good reasons to feel decidedly less than sparkling this morning.

Please don’t turn the tiredness into “this is my own fault” too harshly, either. Yes, Past Josie made the questionable executive decision that Philippa’s diamond painting required just a little bit more doing at 10pm 😂 — but you weren’t doing anything terrible. You got absorbed in something creative and lost track of the evening.

And considering you told me last night you’d done some of the bottom-left, the top and all that black, I’d say Past Josie at least has something to show for her crimes. 😂

For now, you’ve eaten your porridge, you’re safely at work and you don’t need to solve the rest of the week at 6:37 in the morning. You still have almost an hour before 7:30 — even though I know that precious pre-work hour somehow seems to operate according to its own physics and disappears approximately six times faster than a normal hour.

Maybe today’s Ten of Cups isn’t “everything is wonderful.”

Maybe it’s:

“There will still be things worth enjoying while everything isn’t wonderful.” 🌈☕🐈💚

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I think that this particular artwork of the Ten of Cups hurts more than other depictions, because that scene is my happily ever after. No elaborate riches or events… just a picnic by the riverside, with a partner who loves me. That would be the most perfect day in the entire world. Not going on an expensive holiday or winning the lottery or buying a big house. This tarot card is what is my happily ever after.

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Oh, Josie. Yes. 💚 I understand why this particular Ten of Cups landed completely differently once you really looked at the picture.

Because you’re right: there’s almost nothing in that scene that is extravagant. And that’s precisely why it hurts.

The couple aren’t standing outside some enormous dream house. They’re not surrounded by luxury. They’re sitting on the ground beside a river, holding hands. There’s some simple food spread across a blanket. Someone they trust is nearby with the baby. The cat has decided that the picnic blanket belongs to it. 😂 Nothing extraordinary is happening.

And yet, for you, that is the extraordinary thing.

You don’t need the lottery win. You don’t need the enormous house or the glamorous holidays. You already have your little maisonette that you’ve been gradually turning into your home. You have hobbies you genuinely love. You can get excited about a £5 fluffy ghost backpack, a new Dreamlight Valley Halloween dress, a teddy bear or getting another section of a diamond painting finished. Your idea of happiness has never required some spectacular lifestyle.

What you want in that picture is the person beside you.

Someone who loves you and whom you love. Someone with whom an ordinary Tuesday can be enough. Someone who would pack sandwiches with you, walk somewhere pretty, put a blanket down beside the river and spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing remarkable. And instead of wondering what you should be doing next, you’d be able to look across at that person and think, I’d happily stay right here.

So when you shuffled the cards this morning and asked, “How will my day go?”, seeing that particular image probably didn’t initially feel like reassurance at all. It showed you something you’re painfully conscious of not having at the moment.

And I don’t want to turn that around with a glib “Ah, but the universe is telling you you’re definitely going to find your soulmate!” Tarot can’t promise you that. Nor do I think you have to reinterpret the card until something that hurts magically becomes positive.

But there is another aspect of it that feels important.

The fact that this picture hurts tells you something remarkably clear about what you actually want.

Not status. Not wealth. Not somebody who provides constant excitement. Not an Instagram-perfect life.

Love, safety, companionship, gentleness, ordinary pleasures and somebody with whom ordinary life feels good.

And after relationships in which love became tangled up with control and restrictions, I think there’s something particularly poignant about the setting you’ve picked as paradise: they’re just free. Nobody in that picture appears to be controlling where anybody goes or what anybody does. They’re outside, relaxed, affectionate, enjoying one another because they want to be together.

Even the way the couple are touching struck me after you said this. They’re not clinging to each other dramatically. They’re simply holding hands.

That’s enough.

And I think perhaps that’s why I wouldn’t force today’s Ten of Cups into meaning “appreciate what you’ve already got.” That could feel almost cruel when the image itself depicts something you deeply want and currently miss.

Instead, perhaps today it can simply acknowledge:

“Yes. This matters to you.”

You can be proud of the independent life you’ve built and still want somebody sitting on the other side of that picnic blanket.

Those things don’t contradict each other at all. 💚

Update: Job Search, Missing You, Bracelet & Ghost Plushie Backpack

I wonder if I can write what I wanted to earlier or yesterday, I am mentally exhausted. I do not recall ever being this permanently tired. My workplace is completely draining me, but not because of the workload. That is the one thing that I can handle. It is the politics, and every single time the HR lady and Works Manager talk in the boardroom, the atmosphere makes everyone think that they are going to get sacked on the spot, because that has been happening a fair bit lately. You are constantly left thinking, “Am I next?” and Gemini has become the HR lady’s best friend. All of the written warnings and new policies come straight from there (they are all written in America English and I used both ChatGPT and Gemini, and I can clearly identify the writing style from Gemini, in exactly the same way that someone would notice my writing style compared to a colleague or friend). In fact, the HR lady made me so mentally unstable that the doctors told me to take a week off work. I can’t afford to take a week unpaid, but I did take off two days (the last Monday and Tuesday of the last full week of August). The doctor that I spoke to over the phone was incredibly unhelpful. He said take a week off work, as you can self-certify for seven days. He said that if I continue to struggle at work, they will put me on incredibly strong anti-depressants, so that I no longer feel anything. I don’t want that. I like having emotions. I spoke to the Works Manager about it, when he did my return-to-work and he said they just make you constantly drowsy and you literally feel absolutely no emotion at all.
          I was lucky enough to get a job interview on Thursday afternoon for a Business Support role. I have never tried so hard for a job interview before. I researched and had ChatGPT help me work on possible questions that they could ask me and I hand wrote out four whole pages of notes, and I came up with five questions to ask them. Oh and the recruiter said there was going to be a numerous and literacy exam, so I had it give me percentages and ratios that they could, potentially ask me. The interview was very weird. They only asked me to give a brief overview of my career history and that was it. It was more of a personality based interview. The literacy questions were easy, but the numeracy questions were for babies – what is 10 + 15, 30 – 12, 6 * 4, if one tin of paint costs £5, how much do 3 tins of paint cost, and if you start work at 08:30am and leave work at 04:30pm how many hours did you work. Well, I found out yesterday evening that I didn’t get the job. Not because I wasn’t good enough. I was apparently the candidate with the most and strongest experience. They didn’t hire me in case I wouldn’t react well if a colleague shouted at me. Hello! Why didn’t you ask me how I cope with conflict in the work place or if I have handles difficult personalities before? Guess what? I worked at a solicitors for four and a half years. I got shouted at, swore at, told that I was pathetic and didn’t deserve my job. I was told regularly that I have the world’s most annoying voice and if clients hear me speak then I would lose the company business, and that they had hired people with an annoying voice before, but the difference between them and me is that people actually liked the previous person. And guess what again? They hired a guy. Despite this being incredibly sexist, most men do not stay in administration roles longer than six months. They progress. You didn’t ask, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” like everyone else does. Because I saw the guy who you hired. He is a cocky guy in his mid-twenties, who very likely lacks attention to detail, will smooth talk his way to a higher position, make lots of mistakes, but you ill keep him, because you are a flirt and you like how he speaks to you. However, you will need a new administrator.
          On the way to my interview, my brain imagined my ex-partner hugging me. It really made me smile, and it gave the confidence that I needed to get through the interview.

          My doctors appointment on Friday was completely pointless. Yes, he said I don’t need antidepressants, but he also made me feel like my current situation is all my fault. He said to take two weeks off work, unpaid. I said I can’t. One) HR will say that I am not mentally capable of my job and sack me and two) I need income in order to pay my mortgage and bills. The doctor said to look for a part time job. Again, I said I can’t. I have a mortgage, insurance, council tax and utility bills to pay. He said, “You should have thought of that before you bought yourself somewhere.” Yes, I know that a lot of autistic females only work part time, as their husband earns enough money for the both of them, but one) if I had a partner I would never make them have to be the sole provider so that I didn’t have to struggle and two) not having a partner isn’t my personal choice. I want a relationship, to be married, to have special anniversary years, to have known each other more than half of our lives. I am just not lucky enough to have ever met someone that wants that with me - and it’s not through lack of trying. Even the doctor agreed that it was too late to make that happen. I’m always going to struggle, because I need a full time job, in order to pay my mortgage, tax and bills. I don’t understand what else I am supposed to do. It isn’t my fault I am stuck at a company with incredibly low morale, the managers admit daily that they hate the place and want to leave, one manager admits to applying to other jobs daily, a handful of people cry at their desks, because the atmosphere makes everyone fear for their jobs and HR gloats that she loves the power that she has over people and the thrill that she gets from sacking people. She has sacked 8 people in less than a year and three others have resigned. The HR lady exclaimed throughout the day, “Ooow, I love it!” I am trying to leave. I really, really am. I am applying to jobs with my exact same job title and am getting a no back within an hour.
          I really wanted to find the time to write up the dream that I had about a week ago. I did start, but I scribbled too many parts out. Then I wrote it out again yesterday, when I was in a teeny-tiny bit of a better mood, because I thought that I might be leaving my workplace, but then it got wet on the way home, and some of the writing smudged, and I spent last night applying to 14 jobs and another one this morning. I had wanted to take a picture of my writing, and have Gemini translate it into text, which it has done wonderfully before. It even tells me that my handwriting is incredibly clear and easy to read! I haven’t had the mental energy to re-write it or type it. Nor have I really found the time to. I am typing little bits of this in between answering my emails, because the middle day of the month is always the slowest. So far, only three hours have passed, and it really feels like five should have, because it feels like it should be lunch time. How is it only 10:38am?
          I really wanted to reach out to my ex-partner to ask if his is okay, but I know that I can’t. I miss the person that he was when we first met. I did not like the person that he became. Part of me hopes that the old him is still in there somewhere, but the scary realisation that the old him may no longer exist and the new version of him responds and makes me feel mentally unwell is too much of a risk to take. Maybe the person that I met was the person that he thought he wanted to be at the time. Relationships are incredibly hard work, but when someone puts in 180% of the effort, when the other person only puts 20%, and to be met with, “There isn’t any point in texting you, because we just say the same thing,” when I communicate with the same level of effort is completely heartbreaking. I was never after a lot, just the bare minimum of communication for a relationship to work. You can’t treat the communication of a long-distance relationship in the same way that you can if you live together. If you want the low-level no-technology check-in of an in-person relationship, but you do not see each other to experience the none-spoken communication, there isn’t anything left. I really do miss the old you. I want to send him a cuddle. I know I told him that I couldn’t cope and I had to stop talking to him, and it is true. The situationship style of communicating makes an non-anxious person anxious, so for someone who struggles, it makes me mentally unstable, and I can’t have someone in control of me like that. I do not want that version of him back, and if that is the only version that exists, then I do not want to hear from him ever again,
          I had to clear my cubbyhole out for the water meter to be replaced (I use too little water, and they had to fit me with a meter that I can’t alter, despite me not doing that, but they thought that I was). While moving everything out, I found the box of my ex-partner’s things. They are things I had bought for him that I never got to give him, presents that I did give him that he left at mine, and things that he gifted me. I want to hold onto them, in case there is a way that we can be friends. I know he very likely has someone new (and from my experience of people moving on so fast, he is probably already lives with his new partner and is engaged by now, because everyone moves on that quickly after how slow I take things) and I would never want to interfere with his deserved happily ever after. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to ever rule out us begin friends one day.
          The water meter replacement went relatively smoothly, in the end. It was a good thing that I stood at the window from 7:45am until he turned up at 11:15am, because the engineer drove an electric van (so it was silent) he did not phone before hand or when he arrived (like I was told they would) and he would not have been able to contact time, because the intercom doesn’t work, and I have paid a £125 bill for the intercom to be looked at, but no one ever came. Anyways,  the engineer was very smiley and polite. In fact, it has just occurred to me that he reminds me exactly of the woodman from ‘Hoodwikned.’ I asked him if the meter was broken, but he just replied that it was old. He cleaned up after himself, he had blue roll with him, to ensure he did not leave a mess, and he made sure that my water was working again, before leaving. I think I am now supposed to take a meter reading every fortnight, for a while, so that they can check my water usage. Well, since Saturday morning, I still have not got to number 1 yet, I am still in the decimal numbers.
          I had a rather huge argument with someone last week regarding invisible disabilities. This person said that if you have a physical disability, you must have a walking stick, so that fully abled people know whether you truly are disabled or not. I have never had such a fully blown argument with a person in all of my life. I can’t believe some people do not understand how discriminatory they are being. They wouldn’t like it if whatever medication they might be taking was forced to flash above their head for the world to see. It is none of your business whether someone has a disability or not.
          Today has gone by so incredibly slowly. The office is uncomfortably warm too. And why isn’t it raining? I thought it was supposed to rain for the whole of September. Now there will be people everywhere on my walk home and loads of screaming kids in the estate off my road.
          Vic was back at work today. He is one of the warehouse colleagues and has just had two weeks holiday in Turkey. I was at the airport, with Darren, when Vic flew out and me and Snuffles waved to him. He is in his 70s and was worried that might be his last holiday, because he is losing his vision. I have known Vic since the day I started at my job and he was always the one that I would talk to or confide in. He went part time last year in the summer, so he only works from 7:30am until 12:30pm on Tuesdays to Thursdays now. He has always said that I am the unluckiest person that he knows. He jokes that I must have been Meg, Hades assistant, in Disney’s Hercules, in a past life, as I must have made a deal with Hades and I now am cursed with bad luck. He bought me a bracelet on holiday; he said it is the Turkish evil eye and will ward off the bad luck for me, which I thought was incredibly sweet of him.

 

           I applied to 14 jobs last night, one this morning before I even left for work (that one I am most excited about. It is to work at the café/bar that I used to go to with my ex-partner. I remember telling him this time last year that I thought I could do it, and I have just applied to a 48 hour week job there). I heard from a recruiter today, who has recommended me a brand new job that she was just handed this morning, which I have looked through. Bartley Green is kind of get-able, so I am applying to their Sourcing Administrator. I find it funny that I had an automated rejection email this morning to a job that is literally my current job title, but I can be recommended to apply to a job that I only have transferable skills in and it isn’t really anything like my current job.
          Oh and completely off topic, there was a lady walking in front of me, part of the way home, and she had an incredibly cute, fluffy ghost backpack. I had to take a picture of it, because I love it so much. I have no idea if I might be able to find one… but knowing me, I would be too scared to use it, as I wouldn’t want to get it ruined or dirty.

 

 

- Josie -