Once upon a time, I was a young curious teenager. Actually it wasn't that long ago and I defy anyone to prove otherwise, but thats not the point. Anyway, there I was, being angst ridden and stuff when I discovered Tarot. It intrigued me straight away and I decided to get myself my own deck and learn how to read the cards. Unfortunately I had no idea what I was doing at this stage and the friend who had gone with me shopping was about as much use as a chocolate teapot. So the end result was, that I ended up with a Tarot deck that was (as Tarot decks go) very non-standard.
That isn't to say it wasn't a real Tarot deck, it was just that all the books on the subject that I might find didn't relate much to the deck. The Major Arcana were in a random order as far as I could tell and quite a few of them were different. And after much fruitless research I gave up in disgust.
Then I went to University and met someone who really knew what he was talking about. He didn't have much of an idea about these cards either, but as a budding fresher, showed me how to find out the answers on the Internet. Again I found absolutely nothing and the deck soon went the way of all unloved things and ended up at the bottom of a box gathering dust (actually it's lying in plain sight on top of an external harddrive gathering dust).
The urge to learn Tarot didn't die out completely and recently I decided to go and buy another deck. This time I knew what I was doing and bought a copy of the (famous?) Rider Waite deck. As if by magic, I suddenly began to understood what was going on. There were cards that I could look at and see the meaning of. I could probably go back to my original deck and understand it now, because I've realised that reading books doesn't really help. The meanings are in the pictures and it's really just a case of understanding them.
Where am I now? Well I'm still very much a beginner - there is still a lot for me to learn. But it's actually making sense now, I can do readings that rather scarily actually make sense. And whats worse, they make sense to the people I'm doing the reading for. Unlike the sterotypical hustling gypsy woman at a fair, I don't rely on cues from my "victims" to drive the readings, so everything I say is what I see.
Maybe one day it'll become so clear I'll actually be able to write about how it works and explain it to others, but that day is a while off yet.