Ubud, May 2024

 

When I flew to Bali in late 2023, to holiday in Ubud for three weeks, I thought I’d shop for some nice sarongs, eat some nice food, and read some Tarot. I nearly died.

And that was the good news. It could have been so much worse.

I’d come because I had fond memories of a stay twenty-two years earlier, with my then baby son. He was the reason I was alive in the first place. In 2000, on some beach just off the coast of Bali, I’d got clean to become a mum.

This year, in Bali, I nearly killed him.

 

You too do stupid things. Things you don’t want to do. You, too, have disruptive impulses, hopeful intentions, that come out sideways. Pigheaded in the extreme, you ignore all advice, refuse any help, kill yourself cycling to China or fighting for Gaza or even just lying by a pool, insisting you’ll swim, while an ear infection or utter exhaustion, is slowly, methodically, taking you out, from within. This still beats, you believe, boredom, or having feelings. Grief, from feeling unseen. Feeling unheard, invisible—like a ghost, barely alive. You, like me, have a dark heart, a Shadow, you try to outrun. You too have a Child, inside, painfully unloved—who deep down, wishes they died.

 

For the most pitiful reasons! Deep down, my innermost Child, wanted my son—now nearly twenty-three, who’d come to Bali to visit—to look after me. Save my life, again.

 

My Child self believed, that if I got banged up enough, he’d have to stay.

 

That’s the level of pain, your Child self lives with. You live in a hyper-polarised, hyper-monetised world, where predatory algorithms, surveillance capitalism, conflict-aggregation, all prey on your wish, your deepest need, to be seen and heard, love and be loved, to be safe. Where white people simply throw trillions, in public funds, your hard-won earnings, at their right to decide on brown people’s borders, their nations, their states, their checkpoints and walls and prison gates.

 

Next, you’re being sold ‘self care’, as a fix. As if the problem is you. Your pain being strip-mined, packaged, sold back to you, drives you insane. Hyper-alert, scared to eat or bingeing ‘edible substances’ straight from the tub. Celibate, while watching Love Island and stalking your ex. Or having nonstop sex, just to relax. Killing yourself, with a thousand self-limiting thoughts, a thousand little cuts. You fear germs, or runny eggs, or fish. You fear you don’t belong, poolside, because you did no Botox, aren’t rich, like your movie star friends, don’t own a bikini—or, like me, get obsessed, ‘prettifying’ yourself, and own way too many; if little else.

 

In Tarot, there’s a Child who represents this. She’s also the cure.

 

The Princess.

 

She’s disruptive. She’ll mess up your life, your status quo—until she’s being heard. I’ve been working with her since 2000, that year on the beach, when I got clean. I’m a writer turned reader, a novelist nominated for three UK awards, a reporter and essayist. I’m the founder of ESSENTIAL READING, an online platform, helping people recover, whatever from, food, drink, heartache. People like you, in pain.

 

At the start, when I said I nearly killed myself, and it could have been worse, what I meant was not even killing my son. In the years when my Child was at her worst, like yours, I couldn’t bear to ache alone. I was a demon. The Exorcist's little Regan had nothing on me. I egged others on, pushing my own disruptive behaviours on them. Now, with decades of the Princess under my belt, my Child, my Shadow self is loved. My son feels safer with me, he tells me, than before we crashed in Bali. What would have killed me, is if, hating to suffer alone, I’d have bullied him into going on some bender with me. What would’ve killed me would have been not to die, but to survive—had he been drunk.

 

Instead, my son doesn’t drink, and I, two decades clean, transformed, am here, to show you how the Princess works. Forget about Tarot. Princess wants to do for Tarot what Greta did for Barbie. What Kurt did for the skirt. Rumours for divorce.

 

Carrie for blood.

 

The Princess overrides, revolutionises any conduit, certainly mine. Like The Exorcist, she is sublime. I’m selling her as self care, sure. But I’m not telling you to ‘better’ yourself, or manifest wealth. Not a word, promise, on health. She’s about life and death: either kills you, in a crash or slowly, by your thousand, self-inflicted cuts—Or completely transforms you. Either way, she leaves no stone unturned. She is your ectoplasm, your blood, your gut.

 

Once you get to know her, embody your Child, you too will master her havoc. You will understand how crucial her happiness is to the happiness of your loved ones, your friends, daughters and sons, and how your pain bleeds out to them. You’ll learn how to take care of yourself, while asking for help. You’ll love and accept parents, children, lovers, for who they are, let go of fantasy bonds, which brings freedom from heartache, rage, conflict-aggregating algorithms, white people’s privilege, even predatory capitalism—as you yourself tend to your deepest wish, to keep others safe, to love in return. You’ll stop being bought and sold.

 

Though I’m a Tarot healer, this book won’t make you a Tarot reader. But it will help you revolt.