DECEMBER

New Orleans is magic, and so I drag myself a thousand miles southward to beg the help of its witches, soothsayers, voodoo priests, and mediums on the tail end of a Christmas season.

This year was not kind to me, and has me looking for a new kind of magic. The old magic, by which I mean medicine, is on its way out. SSRIs settled my brain, but their side effects were fierce and unyielding. I, with the supervision of a doctor, am going off.

At least for a while. At least until we find something new that works.

I choose a crystal shop in the French Quarter, a place called Earth Odyssey a few blocks from the riverside. I’m a sucker for stones, crystals, pendants, and rocks, and Earth Odyssey is full of them. At a quarter to two, I request a psychic. I don’t call ahead because I’m tired of planning. I’m tired of holding myself together with doctors; with spit and grit and grime. I’m tired of finding new ways to heal myself.

I’m tired of finding new ways to heal myself.
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My reader’s name is Kay. The woman behind the counter tells me “she’s one of our best,” and I believe her. Kay calls me into her tent. She calls me “my dear” like an auntie, and for once in my life, it doesn’t rub me the wrong way. She asks for nothing, not even my name.

“I don’t usually use these cards,” she says, pulling out a bold, vividly orange set, “but they’re calling to me today.”

“You’d know better than I do.” I mean it like a blessing.

Kay moves fast. She tells me that she likes to read first and ask questions later. She flips one, two, three cards, and doesn’t stop. The images come rapid fire, without order or arrangement. “You have a good heart, resourceful. I see a temple.” She marks the outline of a Chinese temple with her hands. “Very empathetic. You feel what other people feel.” And then she slams her hands on the desk. “Oh, you’re an empath.”

No one has ever called me an empath before, but perhaps that’s because, on and off for the last 15 years, I’ve chosen doctors over mediums. I’ve been lectured, patronized, named — but not yet cured. As my options have dwindled, I’ve increasingly turned to magic and tarot.

I want to tell Kay that actually, I’m not an empath, I’m “manic-depressive;” I was diagnosed last June. Before that, I was just a clinically depressed neurotic with an intense anxiety condition. Or something. What we know for sure is that I’m an emotional burnout with a mood disorder, and that I took the medicine because I wanted to stay alive.

I want to stay alive.

JANUARY

Jessica Reidy isn’t a psychic, but she reads tarot cards in the Romani tradition. It’s been two weeks since I started off medicine, and almost a month since I left New Orleans. I sit with Reidy in her Brooklyn apartment to reaffirm what I already know. Because I need to know it in a different way. Because I need to hear it again.

“In my family, fortune telling was a trade I learned as a child,” she explains. “My training began when I was five and was quite rigorous — dream analysis, prayer, and meditation accompanied with hours of studying and learning the lines and symbols in palms, tea leaves, and cards. My grandmother took it unusually seriously because of our family’s legacy of healing and medicine work. Though traditionally we read playing cards, not tarot.”

She sets the cards down and says, “this is an intense arrangement. Not bad, just intense.”

Reidy talks for half an hour about my pain. She offers insight on creativity, balance, and growth. At the end, maybe sensing my distance, she says, “sometimes we don’t let ourselves cry because we’re scared that we’ll never stop,” and it hurts to hear because it’s so true. Mostly though, after years of talk therapy, it feels good just to listen.

After years of talk therapy, it feels good just to listen.
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Indeed, it’s a huge relief to hear something about my problems from someone who isn’t trying to save me. Roma, too, have their own pain. Reidy certainly does. “I’ve had a colorful life with probably far too much trauma, heartache, and fear, and it’s rare that a client comes in with a problem that I haven’t already been through myself,” she says. Reading with her is a bit like speaking to an intuitive older sister — one who’s already been to the mountain.

“It is not about psychism or reading the future,” she explains. She says that fortune telling and performance were some of the few trades that Roma were historically permitted to practice. Tarot isn’t magic, any more than the Roma themselves are. Rather, tarot acts as “an informal therapy session issuing tools and metaphor to better interpret a person’s problems, to see the patterns in their life, opportunities for healing, and to make room for synchronicity. We think of it as creative problem solving with a dash of intuition,” she says, and that’s exactly what it feels like.

“I think everyone I see is looking for healing or comfort in some form,” she continues. “People usually come to me when they are at a crossroads, which involves some kind of suffering. Really, everyone’s question boils down to How can I be happy?”

I want to be happy.

I’m not happy yet, but I definitely feel better than I did when I tried to leave medicine cold-turkey. I was 25, and my descent into madness was swift and unyielding. I dragged more than one friend down with me, and refused to admit something was wrong until it was almost too late.

This isn’t uncommon. In her excellent memoir about living with bipolar disorder, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison writes that “it quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse.”

I bought a deck of cards.

FEBRUARY

Jenna Lee Forde is finishing up her grad work at York University, where she explores the intersection between tarot, queerness, and self care. “My relationship to tarot is focused around using it as a resource for self care, healing, and specifically a divination tool that has a beautiful history of female artists illustrating the cards,” she says. “I most recently got interested in tarot when I was in an abusive relationship that left me with little emotional resources to take care of myself.”

While queer trauma and mood disorders are not intrinsically linked — a distinction I make emphatically in an age of “conversion therapy” — I sought insight from Forde because I knew that she had survived something. “For me, tarot enabled a space for peaceful contemplation,” she says, “and for many trauma survivors, including myself, the process of disassociation and dysregulation are fairly normative parts of our embodied experience.”

Forde’s pain is not my pain, but I know what it is to soar above my body. I know what it’s like to detach into the abrupt high of psychosis, only to slam forward under the weight of endless sobbing depression. I know how to let loose, and I am learning to be reeled in. I am learning to be saved by psychiatrists and doctors.

I know what it is to soar above my body.
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I try not to hate it. My doctors want to save me in the ways they know how, which feel patronizing and, at times, ruthless. They like to remind me that there isn’t a cure. No matter how many coping mechanisms we find, how many medicines I take, I cannot be cured. I need medicine, and I need them. Or else I will spiral. Or else I will destroy everything.

It’s been months since my trip to New Orleans, and I am completely medicine-free. It’s tempting to cut and run, but I keep coming to my therapy sessions. I stay out of duty. Or out of fear.

Forde herself is skeptical. “With the psy-complex, there very little emphasis on mindfulness practices that work to empower trauma survivors to find their own unique methods for healing,” she says. “I think tarot is a tool that can be used in conjunction with mindfulness or mindful based practices.”

I want tarot to be therapy, and it isn’t. Not fully. Tarot is listening; it’s problem solving. And at least that’s something. “If making sense of our life means finding calm ways to organize our disorganized and traumatized parts of ourselves, I definitely think that tarot and the ritual associated with using the cards can create that space,” says Forde. “Keeping my cards in a sacred spot, breathing and grounding and taking in the images and the knowledges from other interpretations of the cards can be a great way to make sense of my life.”

What I want from tarot is what I’ve always wanted from doctors and therapists and social workers: to be told that I’m going to be okay on my own terms. To be told that I am capable of saving myself, even if it is very, very hard. To be told, as Kay did in a crystal shop in New Orleans, that “you’re going to be fine, my dear. You have a deep fear of falling apart, but you’re going to be fine.”

Author’s Note: I cannot stress enough how important it is to consult a medical professional before making any changes to your prescription. My successful come-down was due in large part to a team of psychiatrists and social workers. I am also in the midst of negotiating different medicines. Tarot should only be considered as a tool of self-healing, but not as an alternative to therapy or, when necessary, psychiatry.

Men cry a lot in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. They cry while handing over beloved pets to bent-fingered trolls; they cry while saying goodbye to friends who won’t remember them tomorrow; they cry when they are betrayed by a person who claimed to have their best interests at heart. Men, I daresay, cry more than women in Fantastic Beasts. For a movie that isn’t an overt drama, that’s surprising — and refreshing.

The Harry Potter series revolves around the idea of love as a powerful force against evil — which means that it deals with emotion, on some level, but doesn’t require Harry himself to subvert typical boyhood masculinity. If anything, he has a very normal hero’s journey.

Harry is presented as a loving and kind person, refusing to use cruel or dark magic, but his kindness is the sort of kindness that’s allowable within the framework of masculinity: tied to courage and acts of bravery, an active kindness that is associated with a greater good or nobler cause.

Nursing an individual person back to health is not part of this masculinity, for instance, but standing up for someone who’s being bullied definitely is. It’s a positive but narrow vision of caring that still skirts around kindnesses that might be considered feminine — nurturing, mothering, soothing.

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Empathy and its opposite — callousness, if you want, or ignorance, or bigotry — exist within a typical framework of toxic masculinity.
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In this vein, empathy and its opposite — callousness, if you want, or ignorance, or bigotry — exist within a typical framework of toxic masculinity, a cultural insistence that to be masculine is to be strong and fearless and hard and to never cry, to never be gentle, or vulnerable, or soft, or weak. Empathy — actually experiencing someone else’s emotions as if they were your own — can be part of standing up for someone that’s been bullied, but it’s not required to be; you can stand up for someone because you know bullying is bad, not because you empathize with the target. Empathy is feminized, entrenched innately in the emotional vulnerability that is so anathema to toxic masculinity. After all, in order to empathize with an oppressed person, you have to admit that you’ve felt powerless, and feeling powerless is unacceptable within this framework.

But the core of Fantastic Beasts is a fact, and this fact is the bedrock of its world: Empathy is more valuable, and more powerful, than anything else. J.K. Rowling’s stories tend to reduce the driving force of good to a single emotional truth. In the Harry Potter series, it was love. In the world of Newt Scamander’s beasts, it’s looking like it might be empathy.

There are many different ways to be an empathetic, and therefore good, person in Rowling’s world. The ultra-feminine Queenie can literally read minds, but that power only makes her gentler and more sympathetic. Tina, anxious and more masculine in manner and dress, is removed from her job as an Auror because her desire to protect a boy whose witch-hating mother beats him overrides her professional caution.

Perhaps most notable among the main characters, Jacob Kowalski — a non-magical Muggle, or No-Maj as Rowling is trying to force Americans to say — reacts not with fear or threat to his new magical friends, but with curiosity and open-hearted joy. In a world where magical people have laws against even interacting with non-magical people for fear of oppression and retaliation, Kowalski’s attitude is revolutionary. He cares so much about his friends and their world, even in the short time he’s known them, that when he finds out that his memories of them will be magically obliterated he weeps openly.

Kowalski, and other good men in the Fantastic Beasts universe, are notable for their empathy because it’s usually the domain of female characters.

People expect women to be portrayed as natural empathizers because women are always doing all the emotional labor for other people in their lives; fictional portrayals support the idea that this is not an unfair burden but the way of the world. But if Rowling’s vision for this world is founded on empathy, then her main character, Newt Scamander, becomes the ultimate embodiment of it — and antagonist Grindelwald, played by longtime alleged domestic abuser Johnny Depp in styling and makeup that looks like somebody’s high school OC from a bad Harry Potter Livejournal roleplaying community, becomes its toxic opposite.

Newt, played by Eddie Redmayne, cries several times over the course of the film and gives no indication that he thinks his tears are shameful. In a scene where he must trade one of his companion creatures to a man who runs the seedy underbelly of magical New York in exchange for vital information, he brushes away his tears almost defiantly; he doesn’t necessarily want to cause a scene, but he’s also not ashamed to cry. It’s as if Newt knows his emotions have value and power, and has long been uninterested in denying them. This is a conviction he’s spent a long time cultivating; throughout the film we’re given glimpses of his past, with heavy implication that the people surrounding him bullied, berated, and took from him emotionally. That, and his vehement insistence that humans are the worst and most dangerous creatures on the planet, speak to a vibrant emotional life and sense of self that took time to be certain of. It’s clearly more precious for that.

Newt prefers the company of his beasts to the company of people, and has strong views on what is and isn’t an acceptable way for a human to treat another human. He thinks it’s appalling that American magic folks have laws against marrying, befriending, and even interacting with non-magic folks; he thinks that Kowalski should have a choice between understanding the magical world and being forced to forget it. And he refers to himself as a mother to his baby beasts — their mama, their mum, which makes sense, given Rowling’s interpretation of empathy as a feminine trait. He is unabashed in his love for them, and unflinching in his conviction. He is a true Hufflepuff: loyal, kind, hard-working, and believing in real equality.

Newt is at obvious and immediate odds with the antagonist of the story, an Auror named Graves. Mr. Graves performs sympathy for disgraced ex-Auror Tina and care for the abused boy Credence so well that his reveal as (spoiler!) warmonger and genocidal maniac Gellert Grindelwald in magical disguise is genuinely shocking. Grindelwald is all that toxic masculinity promises. He doesn’t hesitate to use physical violence if he feels it’s necessary. He can’t process his own anger, and so takes it out on those around him. He sees people in black and white — something to be used, or something to be feared. Even if he feels love (and we have vague hints that he does, or will; Rowling has confirmed a romantic relationship between Grindelwald and Harry Potter headmaster Dumbledore), that love doesn’t have a channel through which to be expressed, and so it becomes secondary to his other traits, which read like a checklist of toxic masculinity: coldness, cruelty, violence, anger.

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Grindelwald is all that toxic masculinity promises.
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More than anything else, Grindelwald wants power. His desire for power, like that of evil overlord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, is rooted in bigoted ideology, but it differs in that Grindelwald understands the power of empathy can be used to manipulate people. Voldemort never had much use for love, but Grindelwald wants to understand his targets, so he can use that understanding against them.

It makes him more terrifying, and slipperier, but the film doesn’t confuse him for an antihero — his actual beliefs, and the perversion of his empathy, are clear throughout. There is no good in Grindelwald. He is the ultimate avatar of toxic masculinity; he doesn’t truly believe in empathy, because he doesn’t believe in any kind of vulnerability. Grindelwald believes that the other tenets of toxic masculinity are the real goal: power, strength, control.

To have empathy, and to express it, Newt must act in ways that subvert the framework of toxic masculinity. He cries; he is nurturing, and kind; he has no issue referring to himself as “mama” or “mum,” and sees himself as a mother and not a father to his beasts. He is able to do what Grindelwald can’t: he is able to see people as people, and not just as their potential usefulness.

Credence’s abusive adoptive mother has forced him to suppress his magical power, which has curdled into a dangerous, volatile parasite called an Obscurus. Vitally, when Credence’s out-of-control Obscurus threatens Newt’s life, the lives of people he cares about, and frankly all of New York and all of the magical world, Newt does what Grindelwald can’t: he approaches Credence with compassion, with an interest in understanding his pain and saving his life. He almost succeeds.

It’s unfortunate that so much of the art Rowling creates is exclusionary and oftentimes outright racist — Cho Chang’s racist name, Lavender Brown’s recasting from a black actress to a white one once she became an important character, and the more recent frustration and hurt Native people have felt over her history of the American magical community. All of Rowling’s lessons play out through whiteness, despite ongoing themes of oppression and bigotry. It’s a wasted opportunity, considering that Newt’s story, and the lesson at its heart, is even more valuable in the context of today’s political climate. Anyone, after all, can see themselves as a hero overcoming the forces of evil; a bigot believes in overcoming the forces of evil just as much as an activist for social good. In the world of Fantastic Beasts, true goodness comes not from eradicating difference, but from understanding and feeling compassion for it — a lesson I hope Rowling’s fans take to heart.