Andrada, the Layers Behind Intuitive Muse

Born under a reaching star 

I’m Andrada, the creator of Intuitive Muse, a tarot reader, spiritual guide and teacher. I was born in Iași, Romania, on the twentieth of December, 1997, under the sign of Sagittarius. I think a life should be allowed to start with the facts of it, the place, the date, the sky at the time, because none of what came after makes as much sense without them. Iași is an old city, layered with history and folklore that most people who grow up there absorb without ever naming it directly, and Sagittarius is a sign that never stops reaching for what it doesn’t yet know. Between the two, I think I was always going to end up somewhere close to where I am now.

The Archer

Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter, the planet of expansion, meaning, and truth, and it’s symbolized by the archer, an image I’ve come to understand less as aggression and more as direction. An archer doesn’t shoot without aiming first. There has to be a target, a purpose, something worth the arrow. That’s the part of Sagittarius I recognize most in myself, not recklessness, but a refusal to move through life without asking what any of it is actually for.

Sagittarius is a fire sign and a mutable one, which means the energy behind it is restless and searching, but it doesn’t stay wild for the sake of it, it moves toward something. Philosophy, higher learning, distant places, belief systems, the big unanswerable questions that most people learn to stop asking somewhere around adulthood, that’s Sagittarius territory, and it’s been mine for as long as I can remember. I was the child asking why there was something instead of nothing, long before I had any spiritual language to hold the question in. That instinct never left. If anything, it’s the entire engine behind Intuitive Muse. I wanted to know why I felt what I felt, why my family carried what they carried, why intuition works the way it does, and Sagittarius is the part of me that refused to let any of that stay unexamined.

There’s also a specific placement worth naming here, because it matters to how I move through the world. My sun sits late in Sagittarius, close to the edge of the sign, which in the way I understand my own chart tends to intensify everything I just described. Late degree placements often carry a kind of urgency, as though the sign’s whole lesson has to be lived at full volume before moving on to what’s next. I think that’s part of why I’ve never been able to do this work halfway, why I couldn’t leave it as a hobby, why once the pull toward tarot became undeniable I had to follow it all the way rather than keep it small.

Fire, Earth, and Everything Between

Sagittarius is only one part of the picture, and honestly, it’s not even the part that runs my daily life. My moon and my rising both sit in Virgo, and that’s the half of me most people don’t see right away, the half that organizes, refines, and insists on precision underneath all the fire and searching. Virgo wants things to work. It wants language to be exact, not vague. It’s the reason I can’t stand generic spiritual phrasing, the reason I need my readings to be specific rather than comforting for the sake of comfort, the reason I built an entire brand instead of just posting occasionally and calling it a practice. Sagittarius asks the big questions. Virgo is what actually builds something out of the answers.

My north node sits in Virgo too, which in the way I’ve come to understand it points toward the direction I’m meant to keep growing into over this lifetime, away from abstraction and toward usefulness, structure, and service done well rather than just done big. I feel that pull constantly. It’s why I care as much about how something is written or delivered as I care about the meaning underneath it.

Then there’s the cluster of planets I carry in Aquarius, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Uranus, all sitting together, which is not a small thing to hold in one part of a chart. Aquarius is the sign of the collective, of innovation, of doing things differently on purpose rather than by accident. I think that stellium explains a lot about why I never wanted to build something that looked like everyone else’s version of this work. I wanted a name that included people rather than centering just me. I wanted a philosophy behind the brand, not just a service menu. Aquarius doesn’t do things the expected way, and I don’t think I ever could have either, even if I’d tried.

And I carry Chiron, the wounded healer, in Scorpio, which speaks to something I don’t often put into words but that runs underneath almost everything I do. Scorpio deals in what’s hidden, what’s intense, what most people look away from, and Chiron there suggests a wound that becomes, eventually, the exact thing you’re able to help other people move through. I think that’s true of me. The years I spent not speaking about what I felt, the years I pushed things down, became the foundation of how I now help other people stop doing the same thing to themselves.

Ruled by Nothing but Myself

My daily life is fluid, and it rarely looks the same two days in a row. I’ve always resisted rigid structure in my own life, even while respecting exactly what it’s for in the world around me. Nothing feels truly fixed to me. Nature changes. Rules shift. So I move through my days guided less by a fixed routine and more by my intuition, my body, and whatever state I’m actually in that morning, rather than a version of myself I planned out the night before.

There is one rule I never break, though. Something connected to my work happens every day, without exception. I work from home, and every reading I do is online, but work for me was never just the hours spent in session with someone. It’s everything underneath that too. I read constantly. I study constantly. I’ll say it plainly, I’m a nerd about all of this. I love meditating, reflecting, sitting with a single thought until it finally says what it’s been trying to say. And sometimes I love doing absolutely nothing, because rest has turned out to be just as necessary as any of it, especially on the days I’ve given a lot of myself away. It took years for me to actually believe that without guilt attached to it, and if I’m honest, it’s still something I have to choose on purpose rather than something that comes naturally.

There’s an idea that circulates about spiritual people, that stillness only counts if it looks like a practice, that we’re supposed to be constantly meditating or constantly tuned in. I don’t live that way. Some of my most necessary days are the ones where I’m doing nothing that could be called spiritual at all. I’m simply resting, existing, letting myself be unproductive without treating it as a failure.

Many Things at Once

Outside of tarot, I love things that have nothing to do with tarot at all. I listen to music constantly, and I laugh more than people probably expect from someone doing this kind of work. Anything genuinely relaxing draws me in, without needing a deeper meaning attached to it. I don’t think everything I enjoy has to connect back to spirituality to be worth doing. Some of what keeps me steady is exactly the part of my life that isn’t spiritual at all.

I’ve always been drawn to learning, in almost any form it takes. I read constantly, not only about tarot or spirituality but about anything that pulls my attention, because curiosity has never had an off switch in me. I love animals. I love children. I love people in general, genuinely, even on the days that test that love. I think that comes through in how I read for people, this real interest in who someone is, not just what card landed where.

I’m also far more sensitive than people usually expect. I cry easily, more than most would guess, especially from people who look at me and assume composure or strength means I don’t feel things deeply. The truth is I feel almost everything deeply, and I’ve stopped apologizing for that. At the same time, I can be exactly as powerful and composed as a moment requires, when it’s needed, I can hold that too, fully. People are often surprised by how many layers exist in me at once, the softness and the strength, the warmth and the precision, sitting side by side rather than canceling each other out. I’ve had people tell me directly that they didn’t expect me to be this multilayered, and I’ve come to take that as a compliment rather than a contradiction to explain away.

I see myself as a multidimensional being. I see the world as magical too, not in a way that ignores its difficulty, but in a way that keeps me looking closer at things most people walk past without noticing. I love to love. I’m affectionate, openly so, with the people I let close. But I can also be withdrawn, detached, even cold and precise when a situation calls for that instead, and I’ve learned to trust both sides of myself rather than treating one as more real than the other. I’m a nerd, unmistakably, about anything that lets me learn something new. I love silence, a lot, more than most people would expect from someone whose work involves speaking into other people’s lives constantly. Silence is where I actually hear myself.

I’m trilingual, moving between Romanian, English, and Italian depending on who I’m speaking to and sometimes mid-thought without noticing. I own more than forty tarot decks at this point, and I’m still drawn to collecting more, each one feels like a different lens rather than a repeat of the last. My natural temperament is introverted, and I’ve made peace with the fact that a public-facing path built around an introvert’s nature will always require a specific kind of balancing act. The people closest to me are small in number and deeply chosen.

Aiming, Still

People deserve to know the actual person behind the work they’re trusting with something personal. Intuitive Muse carries a philosophy, but I’m the one living inside it every day, imperfectly, curiously, still learning, still aiming. Sagittarius in me will probably never stop asking why. Virgo in me will keep insisting the answer be built into something useful. And somewhere between the two of them is where you’ll find me, doing this work the way I always meant to, with both halves fully in the room.

Past the First Chapter

That was the beginning. What I didn’t say yet is what it’s actually cost me to keep going, three years into doing this publicly, because the story doesn’t stop at why this matters. It keeps unfolding, and a lot of what’s unfolded hasn’t been gentle. I think people meet Intuitive Muse through a reading, a video, an article like this one, something finished and composed, and they assume the person behind it lives inside that same composure all the time. I don’t. There’s a whole side of this work that never makes it into a testimonial, and I want to actually go there, not skim past it.

Misunderstood, On Purpose Sometimes

I’ve been called a witch more times than I can count, usually by people who mean it as an accusation rather than a description. Strangers online, mostly, and people who don’t actually know me at all, judging from a distance based on nothing but the word tarot. But some of the harder instances have come from people closer than strangers, people who loved me, or who benefited from my intuition themselves when it served them, when it was convenient, when it gave them exactly what they needed to hear in a moment they needed it. Those same people were often the quickest to reach for a word like witch the moment I stopped being useful to them, or the moment I became something more public than the version of me they’d decided to keep in their head. That specific reversal has been harder to sit with than anything a stranger has ever said, because it’s not really about tarot at that point, it’s about people wanting access to what I offer without wanting to actually know who I am underneath it. I’ve had to learn how to let that word exist in other people’s mouths without letting it define how I see myself, and that took longer than I expected it to.

I know real witches. People I respect, people whose practice is intentional, studied, and genuinely theirs, and for them, the word witch isn’t an insult at all, it’s an identity they’ve claimed with full understanding of what it means and what it doesn’t. That’s not what I’m describing when I talk about being called a witch by strangers or by people who used to know a different version of me. What I’m describing is the word being thrown as a weapon, by people who don’t actually know what the word means, who don’t know what tarot is either, who are reaching for the nearest label that lets them dismiss something instead of understanding it. There’s a real lack of education around both witchcraft and tarot, treated as the same vague, frightening thing by people who’ve never sat with either one long enough to know the difference. Tarot isn’t witchcraft, and witchcraft, practiced by someone who’s chosen it fully, isn’t something that needs defending from me either. What I take issue with isn’t the word itself. It’s the ignorance it usually arrives wrapped in.

When the Gift Doesn’t Ask Permission

Nobody talks enough about the parts of intuition that arrive uninvited. I don’t always get to choose what I sense. I have dreams I never asked for, insights about people or situations that show up without context, without warning, and without an obvious use for them. Sometimes I know something is going to happen, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do with that knowledge, no clear action, no clean way to intervene, just the weight of knowing sitting in me until it plays out. There’s a specific kind of helplessness in watching an event unfold that you already saw coming, unable to stop it, sometimes unable to even warn anyone in a way they’d believe or accept. People imagine this gift as something that gives you control. Most days, it gives me the opposite. It gives me awareness without agency, and I’ve had to make peace with holding that gap without it hollowing me out.

What I Lost to Knowing Too Soon

One of the hardest, most private costs of this work is what it’s done to how I meet new people. I used to enjoy the slow unfolding of getting to know someone, the mystery of it, the discovery. That’s harder for me now. I often feel or sense things about people before they’ve told me anything at all, and it changes the texture of a first conversation in a way I didn’t choose and can’t fully turn off. Some of the natural curiosity that used to carry me into new relationships has been replaced by something heavier, an awareness I can’t set down just because it would be more comfortable to. I miss the version of meeting people that felt light. I’m honest about that. I don’t think that makes the gift less real or less worth having, but I won’t pretend it hasn’t taken something from me too.

Close, but never for me

I’ve lost people, or watched certain relationships quietly stop being possible, because of what I do and how others reacted to it. Prejudice has cost me connections I would have kept otherwise, people who couldn’t get past what they assumed about someone who reads tarot for a living, no matter how much of myself I tried to show them beyond that. And on the other side of it, I’ve had people get close to me specifically because of what I offer, not because of who I am. People who wanted free readings, ongoing guidance, access to my insight without any real interest in me as a person once the reading was over. That’s a strange kind of loneliness, being wanted for a skill instead of a self, and it’s taken real discernment to learn the difference between someone genuinely in my life and someone circling what I can give them.

Moments of questioning 

I won’t pretend I’ve never questioned this path. I have, more than once, in more than one season of the last three years. There have been stretches where the weight of being public, being watched, being misread, being wanted for the wrong reasons, all of it accumulated until I found myself genuinely asking whether I should keep going. I think that’s a truer thing to say than pretending certainty never wavers, because it doesn’t, not for me and probably not for anyone doing work that asks this much of them.

What I’ve learned is that questioning a path isn’t the same as abandoning it. Every time I’ve stopped to ask myself whether this was still right, I’ve come back around, sometimes to the exact same direction I was already moving in, sometimes redirected slightly, adjusted, refined. I don’t think that’s failure. I think that’s what it actually looks like to stay honest with yourself over years instead of decades of blind momentum. I want to say that plainly, because I think too many people quietly believe that doubting your path means you’re on the wrong one, and I don’t believe that anymore. Questioning it is often exactly how you find out it’s still yours.

The bow hasn't dropped

Three years in, I’ve learned more than I could have predicted when I first let this become public. I’ve learned what it costs to be seen clearly by some people and completely misread by others, sometimes in the same week. I’ve learned the difference between someone who wants me and someone who only wants what I can give them, a distinction I didn’t always have the eyes for at the start. I’ve learned that the insight I carry will keep arriving whether I welcome it or not, and that my only real choice is how I hold it once it’s here.

Underneath every hard season, this has never once stopped feeling like the truest work I know how to do. I think of the archer again here, the symbol I was born under, because that’s exactly what this has become for me. An archer doesn’t lower the bow just because the wind picked up. She adjusts, recalibrates, breathes, and keeps her eyes on the same target she started with. I’ve had to do that more times than I can count over these three years, and I expect I’ll keep having to do it. But my aim hasn’t moved. I know what I’m building, I know why I’m building it, and I intend to keep going until I reach it, not because the path has been easy, but because it’s mine, and because I’ve already proven to myself that I don’t put the bow down.

Andrada and Intuitive Muse