Four of Cups

4 of Cups Playlist

I’ve been a Sad Girl ™ most of my life. It began with my affinity for the war diaries of young girls — Anne Frank, of course, and Zlata. I identified with their longing, the sense of nostalgia they had for a life that had been stolen from them. My favorite American Girl was Kirsten, and I loved to fantasize about tough pioneer winters, canning vegetables, and curing meats in the attic. Hardship made the banality of daily life feel important. I started keeping my own diary for the historical records of the future. Surely someone someday might be interested in what was going on in suburban Connecticut in the nineties.

At twelve and thirteen, I wallpapered my bedroom with Absolut Vodka ads, listened to Limp Bizkit and Jewel in equal measure, and wrote angsty songs on my guitar. The concerns of a twelve year old girl from a loving home didn’t make the best songs, and so I wrote about teen pregnancy and the unhoused. Pregnancy was a concern my virgin ass had no business worrying about, but that never stopped me. The chorus went:

Goodbye Baby Blue
Your daddy said he loved me
Back when days were gold
He said he’d never leave me
We would be together ’til we’re old
Goodbye Baby Blue
I’m too young to be a mom
What’s gonna happen to us...
when the winter comes?

In high school, I continued writing music and began writing plays. The first play I finished was called Talk of Pleasant Things and I directed and produced it in my boarding school's black box theater with an audience that unfortunately included crush-worthy boys. The play tackled topics like HIV, homelessness, alcoholism, drug addiction, homophobia, and family estrangement. I was working out big feelings through experiences I didn’t have. The volume of my sadness was too loud to be about the loneliness, social anxiety, and constant horrors of puberty, and so I channeled it into something “real.”

What is melancholy if not the emo longing of a suburban girl gaslighting herself? In the absence of war, I attached my anxiety to delusion. Obsessive compulsive disorder tidal waved over my life right before puberty, and carried me through to my mid-twenties occupying the creative part of my brain with fears of contagion and latent sexual deviance. I wasn’t anxious about crushes or friendship or growing up. At least not outwardly. Instead, my fears landed on intrusive thoughts of violence and illness. It scared the shit out of me, but at least the intensity of my feelings felt earned.

For as long as I can remember, there has been a dark place inside of me — if you were to drop a microphone into it, you’d hear an other-worldly creaking, the bellowing and despair of ancient ghosts. In that black hole of need, my desire for escape grew, vines twisting up and out of it, watered and nurtured by a demon with a watering can full of alcohol and the validation of men. The demon watered the longing and ancient sadness, while also moaning through a megaphone at the center of me: “You do not deserve this feeling, you are a drama queen.”

In the Rider Waite Colman Smith deck, the four of cups shows a young person sitting under a tree, staring, arms crossed, at three golden chalices. A fourth chalice is offered by a specter of a hand appearing beside them from a helpful little cloud (an image you may remember from the Ace of Cups). Though the day is sunny, and the cups are golden, and the tree provides the shade, and the grass is green, and the person is young and seemingly healthy, their eyes are turned down. There’s something off. This person is unhappy but they’re not sure why. The four of cups depicts ennui, melancholy, depression. This card illustrates a person who looks okay from the outside, but who is suffering internally.

As I near forty, I am trying to attend to the needs of the longing chasm at the center of me. It is hard not to roll my eyes, or berate myself for feelings I don’t believe I’ve earned. The truth is, earned or not, the pain is real and the longer I ignore it, the bigger it gets. At a certain point, I have to stop running and face it.

When I stare into the abyss, a teenage girl stares back. Her hands are raw, cracked and bleeding from over-washing. She is desperate to be loved by a boy, because somewhere deep at the center of her is the fear that she is monstrous, unloveable, and if a boy doesn’t choose her, she might cease to exist. She is afraid of her feelings, especially the ones that free float unattached to an event.

She doesn’t understand that sadness can be chemical, that it can come from anywhere, even happiness. Melancholy is an ancient being attached to a universal consciousness. Every once in awhile, it awakens within her, sees the world through her eyes, and colors her thoughts. Suddenly, a sunny day reminds her of 9/11, her children’s laughter sounds like mortality, her work feels stale and arbitrary. The demon at the edge of the chasm cackles inside her rib cage, “Write your little television episodes while the world burns!”

And so, though it is sunny and I'm finally working again and there is much to be thankful for, the chasm remains. The election nears, I’m texted seven hundred times a day by Nancy Pelosi and Jill Biden with warnings that democracy itself will end in November if Trump wins. Meanwhile, The New York Times quotes our folksy national grandpa saying if Trump wins he’ll be okay with it as long as he tried his best. Days later, shots are fired at a Trump rally. After a moment of confusion and panic, Trump, bleeding from one ear, pushes through his secret service detail to defiantly raise his fist in the air, an American flag framed in the sky high above him as hundreds of cameras shutter and click. The crowd roars. Inside me, the teenaged demon wails and wails.

I scroll through other people’s vacation photos on instagram, and suddenly, I’m face to face with the crumpled body of a six year old in Gaza. The bottom drops out. Fireworks announce the independence of our dying republic, and then for weeks afterward, the fireworks inexplicably continue, explosions lighting up each night of the summer, a battle cry, in celebration of the Dodgers scoring or in defiance of the police. My seventy pound dog curls herself around my neck like a scarf, shaking with fear. Katy Perry releases "Woman's World," into our post Roe reality. Sexy, confident, so intelligent, she is heaven-sent, so soft, so strong... Helicopters stalk through the skies of Los Angeles, spotlights piercing the darkness, searching and spying. The heat is dry and unsettling. The city is a tinder box. Driving down the 134, I listen to Chappell Roan and pretend not to smell the burning.

There is plenty to be sad about. Sometimes it’s okay to feel it. When you get the four of cups, it’s time to journey to the chasm within and say hello to the demon. When you do, you may find that the demon looks an awful lot like a sixteen year old version of you, the one who’s rawness and vulnerability sits just beneath the skin, the one you’ve tried to bury. If you ask the girl what’s wrong, she may not be able to answer, or she may try to cite the worries of the world as her own. The four of cups asks you to sit with her at the chasm and tell her that she does not need to search for a reason for the feeling. Sometimes, it’s okay just to feel everything.

Four of Cups Recommendations

On Saturday night, we watched James Cameron's Titanic as a family. This movie is filled with four of cups energy, and it hits a deep four of cups nerve in me. I saw Titanic four times in the movie theaters when it came out in 1997. I was newly thirteen years old. The perfect age to identify with Rose's ennui and to fantasize about Leonardo DiCaprio lovingly drawing me naked on a settee in my first class accommodations. If you're in a four of cups mood, I highly recommend taking your inner teenager on a journey back to 1912. And then watch this: