It's Time to Make Your Fantasy a Reality

Or, what Pamela Anderson taught me about the Seven of Cups

Drew Barrymore’s interview with Pamela Anderson brought one of my typical social media scrolls to a stop last week.

In case you’ve missed it, the former Playboy bunny slash Baywatch babe slash famously buxom blonde reentered the spotlight last year when she attended a Paris Fashion Week show sans makeup and continued to do so as an ode to embracing her older, more natural beauty.

In fact, Barrymore followed Anderson’s lead and went without hair and makeup for this episode of The Drew Barrymore show, and while that’s what initially caught my attention, what held it was the story Pamela Anderson was telling, an experience I couldn’t identify with more. (I’ll take “Words I Never Thought I’d Be Saying” for $600, Alex.)

Image credit: The Drew Barrymore Show/Ash Bean

Anderson revealed that she pushed herself to do Playboy even though it made her physically ill because she was so sick of being shy. No doubt realizing how well playing this perhaps less than authentic role worked out for her, she went on:

And then I just thought, “Oh, this is my fantasy of what a model is, or a playmate is, or a rockstar wife is, or whatever is, and I’m gonna do it the best.” And I’ve been playing these characters along the way. And it just hit me a couple years ago: WHO AM I???

…And I just started taking it all back, and I started peeking out without makeup, and I realized I feel great as me! And I don’t want people to think of me as all those cartoon characters I kind of created as protection.

Years of creating characters for yourself to mask shyness, insecurity, and self-doubt is something I know all too well: the bubbly, flirty, cheerleader in high school; the vintage-wearing, songwriting, manic pixie dream girl in college; the serious law student; the jet-setting fashion attorney. Even now, I catch myself saying things like, “But is this professorial???”

PAMELA ANDERSON IS SO REAL FOR THIS.

So many of us mask our true identity - if we even know what that is! At the very least, if we aren’t completely faking it, we tend to mask parts of our identity and exaggerate or accentuate others that we think will be safer, more appealing, more consistent, perhaps more unique, easier to pull off or maintain, and - for those of us who are creatives or entrepreneurs - dare I say more marketable or algorithm-friendly?

It never ends.

As so often happens to my tarot-fluent brain, a specific tarot card started to materialize in my head as I continued to ponder Pamela Anderson’s oh-so-relatable honesty.

It was the Seven of Cups.

To be more specific, it was the hauntingly beautiful Seven of Cups from The Dreamkeepers Tarot by Liz Huston.

Seven of Cups from The Dreamkeepers Tarot by Liz Huston

The Seven of Cups generally is a card of choices. So many different options, paths, and possibilities are available to us at various points in our lives. While sometimes the existence of these seven metaphorical cups - or in Huston’s case, masks - can feel expansive and even exhilarating, other times we are plagued with doubt and indecision. Real life is not a game show after all, and we never really get to see what was behind the doors we didn’t pick.

But beyond mere choice, the Seven of Cups has an air of illusion and evanescence about it. As Rachel Pollack describes in Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom:

Emotion and imagination can produce wonderful visions, but without grounding in both action and the outer realities of life these fantastic images remain daydreams, “fancies” without real meaning or value.

…

It is a mistake to think that daydreams are meaningless because of their content; on the contrary they often spring from deep archetypal needs and images. They lack meaning because they do not connect to anything outside themselves.

And there’s the significant lesson in the Seven of Cups about illusion and reality: Our visions and fantasies aren’t meaningless illusions precisely because of the fact that we have them. We wouldn’t have them if they didn’t carry meaning or import for us! And once we start embodying these illusions (for better or worse), they start to take on a reality of their own.

Which brings me to my next question: How can we tell if a persona is an illusion or reality? And does it always matter?

Pamela Anderson claims that the sexy bare-it-all blonde was not her authentic self. But wasn’t it, at least partly? I’m not here to argue what feels aligned and true for her, of course, but what I mean is that she did in fact successfully embody a bold, confident, sexy persona (or fantasy, to use her word). So who’s to say that she is not also that - if she wants to be, of course? Sure, she isn’t embodying it in the same way she used to (lots of makeup, miniskirts, and cleavage), but I’d argue that her natural-faced, Substack-writing, garden-tending persona is still bold, confident, and sexy, wouldn’t you?

No illusions there!

My husband and I drove to Ojai earlier this week to spend a few days decompressing after I submitted final grades for the fall semester, and a remarkable synchronicity happened in our protracted search for a movie to stream in our hotel room one night.

We finally gave up and landed on a movie called Hit Man that neither of us were particularly enthusiastic about but ultimately chose because my husband likes Richard Linklater. The premise? (Based on a true story by the way!) A philosophy professor who moonlights as an undercover hit man for the police department, successfully causing dozens of arrests for conspiracy to commit murder.

Here’s where it gets interesting: The professor - normally reserved, nerdy, totally boring and forgettable - has to tailor his hit man’s persona to each suspect to gain their confidence: a severe Russian for one lady, a backwoods MAGA-type for another guy, and, eventually, a really handsome, charismatic, smooth-talking version of himself for a young woman. And the existential question for the character (and for us as viewers) becomes the same one I’ve been grappling with since the Pamela Anderson interview:

Which persona is an illusion and which is reality? And does it matter as long as we are aware of our choice and intention?

The lines of identity for the hit man become blurred, and there’s even a moment where one of his students looks at her friend and whispers, “Umm, when did our professor get hot!?”

In fact, as I write this, I’m reminded of another cinematic classic, Mrs. Doubtfire. Sally Field is so pissed at Robin Williams for being so reckless and dishonest with their children, but was he? He was the one embodying the loving, nurturing, responsible nanny, after all. So which version of that character was the illusion and which was reality? And again, does it matter?

Can you think of other examples? Perhaps even from your own life?

I’ve written about this idea of various versions of ourselves before in the context of the Ace of Pentacles, and that same lesson seems to be reemerging for me now with the Seven of Cups. It makes sense in terms of timing, as many of us are probably reflecting on the year and starting to envision or imagine what the new year might hold for us.

Is there a version of you that feels like an outgrown illusion that you’d really like to shed for 2025?

Is there a fantasy version of you that you’re finally ready to start embodying for real in 2025?

And have you seen Hit Man!? It’s currently streaming on Netflix if you, like me, need a palate cleanser in between Christmas movies. (This one was ours after The Holiday and before Love Actually.)

If you want some help from your tarot cards to sort through various fantasies that might be in play in your own life, here’s a tarot spread for you to try this week. I call it The Fantasy Tarot Spread, and I created it exclusively for this week’s newsletter.