I expected to feel foolish. I did not expect to feel seen.
AUTHOR: Sarah Brennan
CATEGORY: Self-Knowledge / Decision Making / Personal Experiment
READING TIME: 9 minutes
I should tell you upfront that I am not the person you would expect to write this article.
I am not someone who burns sage or collects crystals. I do not own a velvet pouch. I have a spreadsheet for my grocery list and I once spent three days researching the optimal angle for a monitor to reduce eye strain. I am, in other words, exactly the kind of person who would ordinarily dismiss tarot as nonsense dressed up in candlelight.
But I was also, at the start of last October, someone who had made three significant decisions in as many weeks — all of them uncomfortable, at least one of them probably wrong — and could not for the life of me explain why I kept second-guessing myself. I was not in crisis. I was just… foggy. Stuck in a kind of low-grade decision paralysis that I had been telling myself was perfectly normal and was in fact quietly exhausting me.
A colleague mentioned Tarot Engine. Not in a mystical way — she described it as “a structured journalling system with a scoring mechanism.” That, I could work with.
So I committed. Thirty days. One reading per day. Every decision, tension, and doubt I was carrying — logged, scored, and handed to an AI called Seren. I would write down what she said. I would record my Decision Tension Index score. I would look at the data at the end and see what, if anything, was there.
What follows is what I found.
WEEK ONE: THIS FEELS RIDICULOUS
The first reading took me eleven minutes. Not because it was complicated — it was not — but because I spent about five of those minutes feeling deeply self-conscious about talking to a piece of software about my feelings.
Seren asked me five questions before my first reading. Not about astrology or birth charts. About how I typically behave when I am uncertain. Whether I tend to gather more information or act on instinct. Whether I trust my gut or distrust it. Quietly precise questions that felt less like a personality quiz and more like the opening of a therapy session.
She identified my archetype as The Analyst. I read the description and felt the particular discomfort of being accurately described by something that does not know you.
My first card was the Two of Swords. A figure blindfolded, holding two crossed swords, seated before a vast sea. The traditional meaning involves a stalemate — a decision being avoided, information being deliberately shut out.
My DTI score that day was 8 out of 10.
The decision I was nominally thinking about was whether to take on a new project at work. But Seren’s reading did not talk about work. It talked about the shape of my avoidance. “You have enough information to act,” she wrote. “The blindfold is not protecting you from uncertainty. It is protecting you from accountability.”
I closed the app and went for a walk. I did not know what to do with that.
By day five, the self-consciousness had faded. I had drawn The Moon twice, the Three of Pentacles once, and something called the Seven of Cups which Seren described as a tendency toward fantasy thinking when real options felt overwhelming. My average DTI for the week was 7.2.
I noted, without drawing any conclusions, that I was consistently drawing water cards.
WEEK TWO: SOMETHING SHIFTS
On day eight, I drew The Tower.
If you know tarot at all, you know The Tower is the card people dread. A tall structure struck by lightning, figures falling from the top, flames pouring from the windows. It is the disruption card. The sudden collapse card.
I braced myself for Seren’s response.
She did not catastrophise. She did not tell me something was about to fall apart. She said: “The Tower rarely signals something being destroyed that was not already unstable. The question worth sitting with is not what is falling — but what you have been building on ground that cannot hold it.”
I read that sentence four times.
There was something I had not been saying out loud, even to myself, about a professional situation I had been managing for several months. The Tower did not reveal it. But the space that the reading created — the five quiet minutes of honest reflection before logging my score — let me say it to myself for the first time.
My DTI that day was 9. My highest so far.
What interested me, looking back at the week’s entries, was the relationship between my DTI score and the day of the week. By the end of week two I had enough data to notice something: my scores on Mondays and Sundays were consistently higher than mid-week. Not dramatically — but reliably. There was something about the transition points of the week that tightened the screws.
I mentioned this to Seren on day fourteen. She had already noticed.
“Your tension peaks at the edges of your working week,” she said. “Sunday anxiety about Monday, and Monday’s weight accumulating before you have had time to discharge it. Mid-week, you are in motion. Motion reduces tension. The question is what you are carrying into the weekend.”
I had never consciously noticed this about myself. I had experienced it, obviously, in the vague form of Sunday dread that I had long assumed was universal. But seeing it as a pattern — as a measurable, consistent feature of my psychological landscape — made it feel workable rather than just atmospheric.
WEEK THREE: THE DATA GETS INTERESTING
By day seventeen, Seren surfaced her first formal pattern observation.
“You have drawn water-suit cards — Cups — in six of your last nine readings. This is not coincidence. The Cups suit speaks to emotional intelligence, relationships, and intuition. When it dominates your spread this consistently, it typically signals that the decisions you are framing as logical or practical are, underneath, decisions about how you want to feel. Not what you want to achieve.”
I sat with that for a long time.
The project I had been agonising over — the work decision from week one — was not actually a question of whether it was strategically sound. It was a question of whether I wanted to spend the next eighteen months in a room with a particular set of people doing a particular kind of work. I had been analysing it as if it were a financial instrument. It was, at its core, a question about belonging.
I accepted the project on day nineteen. My DTI dropped to 4 the following day — the lowest score I had recorded.
Something about naming the real question, rather than the proxy question I had been asking, released the pressure.
I noticed this effect repeatedly across the month. The readings were not telling me what to decide. They were helping me identify what I was actually deciding about — which turned out, more often than I expected, to be a different thing entirely from the question I thought I was carrying.
WEEK FOUR: WHAT SEREN GOT WRONG
I want to be honest here, because I think dishonesty in articles like this is its own kind of problem.
There were days when the readings felt like nothing. Days when the card felt arbitrary, Seren’s interpretation felt generic, and the whole exercise felt like sophisticated journalling with extra steps. Day twenty-three was one of these days. I drew the Ace of Wands — a card about new beginnings and creative energy — on a day when I was primarily anxious about a tax return. The reading felt misaligned. My DTI was 5, which accurately reflected a day of medium-level background noise rather than anything meaningful, and Seren’s response felt accordingly thin.
I logged it and moved on.
But here is what I noticed about those flat days: they were informative in their own way. A DTI of 5 is not a crisis. It is the hum of ordinary life. Seeing those scores sitting in my timeline alongside the 8s and 9s made the high-tension periods look different — not as my default state, which is how they had felt from inside them, but as spikes against a relatively calm baseline.
The data was reassuring in a way that the individual experience had not been.
There were also two occasions when I felt Seren had located something real but pushed the interpretation slightly too hard. Once when she connected a recurring Swords theme to “a relationship with conflict that may be worth examining” — accurate in direction but further than I wanted to go in a five-minute morning reading. I made a note of it and did not engage. She did not push. That felt right.
DAY THIRTY: LOOKING AT THE TIMELINE
On the last day of October I opened my Decision Timeline and looked at thirty days of data.
The heatmap was the first thing that stopped me. Thirty days of squares, each coloured by tension level — pale lavender for calm, deep purple for high. The pattern was immediately visible in a way that the individual readings had not been. Two clusters of deep purple: one in week one, around the work decision. One in week three, around a personal situation I had been reluctant to examine. A steady drift toward lighter colours in the final ten days.
I had been getting calmer. Not because my life had become simpler — if anything, the month had been complicated — but because I had been naming things rather than carrying them unnamed.
The chart of my DTI scores over time showed a curve I would not have predicted: an initial spike, a sustained high plateau through weeks two and three, and then a clear downward trend. The pattern looked like the kind of emotional arc you might expect from an honest conversation with a good therapist. Pressure building, a point of reckoning, and then a release.
Seren’s thirty-day summary was three paragraphs long. I will not reproduce it in full, but the line that stayed with me was this: “You entered this month asking what to do. You are leaving it knowing what you were actually asking.”
That was accurate.
WHAT I CONCLUDED
I went into this experiment expecting to feel foolish and to write a gently sceptical account of a month spent talking to an AI about tarot cards.
I did not expect the data to be useful. I did not expect the patterns to be real. I did not expect to finish the month with a clearer understanding of how I make decisions — not which decisions to make, but the structure of my avoidance, the shape of my tension, the gap between the questions I ask and the questions I am actually carrying.
A few things I know now that I did not know thirty days ago:
My decision tension peaks on Sundays and Mondays. This is not a feeling — it is a measurable, consistent feature of my week. Knowing it, I can work with it.
I process significant decisions through an emotional lens first, a logical lens second. I had spent years believing the opposite. The data corrected me.
The gap between my stated question and my real question is almost always there. The readings did not answer the stated question. They kept pointing at the real one. Over thirty days, that pointing was more useful than any number of direct answers would have been.
I am not going to tell you tarot is magic. I do not believe that and you probably should not either. What I am going to tell you is that a structured daily practice of honest self-examination — with a mechanism for tracking the data and surfacing the patterns — is genuinely valuable. Tarot Engine gave me the structure. The thirty days gave me the data. Seren gave me the observations I was too close to see for myself.
I am still using it. My current DTI is 6. The card this morning was The Hermit — a solitary figure with a lantern, walking alone in the dark, not lost but deliberately apart, looking for something that requires quietness to find.
That feels about right for a Tuesday in November.
ABOUT TAROT ENGINE
The readings in this article were completed using Tarot Engine (tarotengine.com) and its Tarot Intelligence Engine plugin. The Decision Tension Index, pattern recognition, and Seren AI coaching layer are all features of the platform. A free tier is available. The Pro licence — which includes the full Decision Timeline, Soul Audit, and PurposeDNA layer — is available from £7.99.