A Star is born ✨

How I found my way back to hope...and to him

The Star is one of the most encouraging and uplifting cards in tarot.

Traditionally, The Star features a naked woman kneeling before a pool of water with a vessel in each hand: one pouring water into the fertile earth around her, the other pouring water back into the source—signifying abundance, nourishment, and restoration.

Following The Tower card in the Major Arcana, The Star represents a renewed sense of hope after a period of tremendous difficulty and destruction.

In the essay “Starlight Through the Smoke” published in The Rebis, Meg Jones Wall writes:

“As an archetype, The Star is one of the most beloved and soothing cards in the deck, representing faith, dreams, recovery, healing, optimism, belief in ourselves, strength, and restoration.

After the terrifying freefall of The Tower, after seeing the truth whether we like it or not, The Star offers a balm to our ragged, overstimulated spirits. Even when it’s just a tiny speck of light millions of miles away, even when we aren’t sure what shape the future may take, The Star’s gentle light guides us toward a new hope.

Transformation, especially the kind that we see in Death and The Tower, requires mourning . . . The Tower’s chaos may demand that we stay present and alert, even as we struggle to reconcile the past we experienced with the realities we see now.

But it’s The Star that slowly tugs our gaze to the future, that tends our wounds and dries our tears.

It’s The Star that reminds us of how powerful hope can be.

And it’s The Star that allows us to imagine something new, something revolutionary, something that’s still in the process of being born.

By letting our grief breathe, in acknowledging loss and transformation, we make space for hope to take root.”

The past several years have been a period of mourning, of acknowledging so much loss and integrating so much transformation. There were times it felt unceasing and overly demanding, like my soul was being sucked dry through some sort of Spiritual Dementor’s Kiss.

However, back in December, my gifted friend Amanda pulled The Star for me in a Heartspark session around relationships. She told me the mantra of The Star is “I expect miracles,”—that it represents divine timing, expectations being fulfilled, serendipity, and faith.

Would my years of holding out for a wholehearted yes finally be coming to fruition? Could I really allow myself to believe in miracles again—a miracle meant just for me?

A few weeks later,

Michelle LaCroix

sent me a literary magazine called The Rebis that just so happened to dedicate their entire issue to The Star card. Call it coincidence, call it synchronicity—it was a clear wink from the universe that I could not ignore.

In the long, seemingly never-ending aftermath of my cancer journey, I couldn’t imagine a better energy with which to enter into the new year. Thus, a star was born ;) and The Star officially became my Word of the Year for 2025.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that just a few years prior, I boldly chose “Romance” as my Word of the Year, only to receive a freaking cancer diagnosis.

(Don’t you dare come at me with “Maybe it was about seLF-LoVe!” I will riot.)

Frankly, I’ve had plenty of reasons not to believe in magic and hope again. Even when I was well past the acute trauma of treatment, I still kept hitting a wall over and over again, wondering if I would ever make it out of the endless loop of chronic illness and uncertainty.

A psychic medium told me to expect a shift in my energy in October. Bolstered by this message, I went into October feeling excited and hopeful—I even posted about it; that’s how sure I felt!—and left it feeling deflated and confused.

That month, I had a sudden and particularly brutal dysautonomia flareup that left me unable to drive for weeks and got norovirus the night before my best friend’s wedding and all of the anticipation and hope for long-awaited change seemed to shrivel up and crackle like the dried up leaves blanketing the ground.

It seemed that no matter what my intention was or how determined I was or even what the universe seemed to be revealing to me, I could not catch a break.

But nowhere in her message did the medium say the shift in energy would look or feel a certain kind of way. In my longing for something different after a seemingly never-ending season of healing, I interpreted it to mean I’d feel better, happier, clearer.

It turns out that this shift was more of a final purge—a literal and spiritual purge—that would finally clear out space for something new: a quiet certainty that transcended mere wishful thinking.

While I applaud myself for setting the intention for romance to come into my life during a time when I believed I was genuinely ready for it, something felt different this time. Unlike before, when I grasped at romance as something to manifest—to claim as rightfully mine—this time, I was cracked wide open to possibility, in all facets of my life, from a place of wholeness and humility.

Looking back, the universe had been planting seeds along my path for months—tiny moments of synchronicity and connection that I might have missed had I not been laid bare by the clarifying fire of my healing journey.

• Dancing around a fire with witchy friends from afar and releasing the final shreds of grief that lingered.

• Getting an unexpected visit from a dear friend and having a breakthrough coaching moment on the couch.

• Making a public dating profile that wouldn’t see the light of day but would signal a shift in my energy.

• Even something as silly as finally making the investment in Invisalign—something I had hoped to complete before my future wedding day.

It all felt…magical. Important. Like pieces of a puzzle coming together, even if I didn’t know what picture it would form.

It felt like hope.

On that fateful day in Salem, the medium left me with a final message from my grandma, who reassured me that, “Prince Charming is around the corner. We're just trying to adjust your energy for us. Even if you don't move, there'll be someone that you meet at some point. It could be November, December, or the beginning of the new year.”

Lo and behold, by the end of December, before my year of The Star even officially began, I met him. And everything has changed.