Diagnosis, Divorce, and Divination
Lessons from the Tarot on a Year of Radical Change
Please be aware this story contains discussions about mental illness and a brief mention of suicidal ideation.
This year should have been devastating.
It was a shakeup that rattled my world to dust.
I had a mental health crisis requiring inpatient care — the worst depression in my life and the first dangerous episode since I was twenty-one. On the heels of that turmoil, I ended my marriage after seventeen years of partnership.
But like the iconic Death card in the Tarot, what looks like the end of everything is really a radical new direction.
When I turn over the Death card during a reading, people are shaken.
But if you’re a traditional interpreter, the card doesn’t foretell a physical death. It indicates that an aspect of the psychological or spiritual self is being laid to rest so a new life can be born.
You’re right to be startled when the face of this card is revealed, though.
It’s the intimidating, Things Will Never Be the Same Again card. It’s a psychic cataclysm of change.
Hell yes. This card was my 2018 through 2019 theme.
When I talk about my divorce or, less frequently, my hospitalization, people react with warm sympathy for this sad news. They’re startled by my insistence that the changes in my life and family were quickly — and mutually — pretty fucking wonderful.
Maybe my celebrating these huge changes with a slightly manic smile makes them nervous. It’s more than understandable. They know my impulsive, headfirst dives. I don’t do anything by halves.
And I’m not unafraid. But this is about not just facing, but embracing that fear. That’s what Death is telling us.
It says, “It’s time. That wide, black unknown you’re avoiding? You’re about to swallow it hole.”
I was literally living in the dark.
I slept in our basement because I needed a dim, quiet place to ride out horrible migraines. The only treatments that gave me relief made me feel half dead. It had been nearly a solid year then of headaches. They were hitting almost constantly and lasted for days at a time.
At the same time, I had slipped into a depressed mood about my marriage. These happened every few years, so much like clockwork that my husband and I made dark jokes about it.
The Death card reversed: The holding pattern before all hell breaks loose.
In truth, the last decade of the marriage I hadn’t really been content, or even present. It was impossible to process anything so complicated then, and the prospect drained me. I was stuck in that circle, and I’d been through it so many times before that it seemed to be an inevitable and normal part of my life.
And that’s the reversed meaning of the Death card. When it appears upside down in a reading, you aren’t ready to confront the major changes in store for you. It’s the face of stagnation. Of feet stuck fast in the mire, unable to take the first step.
It’s the holding pattern before all hell breaks loose.
I drifted through months that I remember as being almost completely filled with sleeping off headaches.
But one night at 3 o’clock a.m. I woke suddenly, breathing in gasps like I’d woken from a nightmare. I was wild and wide-eyed and said aloud into the cool silence, “I cannot grow old and die with him.”
It’s powerful symbolism for me that this clarity came at the witching hour.
A thousand times in our years together I’d been certain it was over and then not certain, so I sat with this knowledge for weeks. It wouldn’t budge. The weighty truth of it sat like lead in my guts. I knew it was different this time, but I was more hopeless than ever about making plans.
I couldn’t take action to leave with my disabilities, my tiny income, and worst for me — the awful guilt of harming our daughter or hurting him. I obsessed over the contradiction between knowing what my soul needed and the infeasibility of doing it.
The anxiety and the pain ravaged me until I broke down.
The hospital stay barely qualified as medical care. (A longer, infuriating story.) But the event, the decision to go and the brilliant nurse practitioner I saw afterward as an outpatient changed my life more than any other medical treatment I’ve had.
I slumped into her office chair with my teary, salt-burned face and started explaining my situation. She let me ramble and weep about my marriage and my complicated medical history, and I told her how discouraged I was about both my pain and my psych treatments. She let me tell her everything I had the energy to say and calm down enough to breathe.
Then she gave me a tissue and asked, “Has anyone ever told you you’re bipolar?”
My rambling, circuitous way of talking was actually her clue. I have fragmented and pressured speech, which is a strong indicator of bipolar disorder. After running through my symptoms, she was able to confirm her hunch and a lifetime of my questions all suddenly had one simple answer. An answer with a prescription treatment.
Still, I was wobbly for a while.
I felt like I was floating. The new medicine was bizarre. I had LSD-like tracers and severe dissociation for weeks.
The tension at home had eased for a while after the hospital, from the sheer comfort of familiarity and care. My ex was warm and supportive through the ordeal, and we talked in depth and eventually it burst out of me, this truth I thought would ruin our lives.
But it didn’t. Like turning over the Death card with its dread image symbolizing a new direction, voicing my buried truth revealed it to be a map to a different path.
When the noisy mess of emotions settled, we realized how mutual the need to move apart had become. He had new plans, too. I am so proud of how we communicated and worked, together and apart.
He asked me to promise to stay until my new medication was stabilized, and I was happy to agree. After the burst of emotions and settling into the new version of our family, we were learning to be great roommates. I saw a headache specialist at the Cleveland Clinic and found treatment that prevents most of my migraines.
But I was still a dazed, murky brain and felt miserably disconnected. I struggle with dissociation at the best of times but this was unbearable.
Then I tried a second medication and a key slipped into a lock and opened a door I didn’t know existed.
After nine or ten months on consistent medicine, I feel like myself. When I was first diagnosed, I’d been worried, like a lot of artistic people with bipolar disorder, that my intensity and creativity would be tamed or dampened. In fact, I had a terrible experience with an antidepressant in college that actually did affect my creativity.
But I’m more productive than I ever have in my life. I still have so many ideas I couldn’t even attempt draw or write all of them, but I’m actually able to assess which ones have potential and do something with them.
I started a long-term art and writing project I’ve wanted to do since I was a teenager, but I never had the ability to plan or focus on such a large task. Now I’m working on creating a Tarot deck and book.
For the first time in more than ten years, I’m not taking anti-anxiety pills. I’m enjoying a new partnership as friends and coparents with my former husband. As I write this in our family home, we’re still roommates. My little cave is a cheery mismatch of bedroom and studio.
I’ve been in therapy, I’ve been journaling, and I’ve been digging deep. I’ve been able to let go of a lot. Living through the Year of the Death Card, it turns out, gave me a shitload of confidence.
I feel pared down and essential and stripped to the bone.
I have the opportunity to move out soon, so the life shake-up continues. I’m ready for another year of changes and growth.
Let the psychic cataclysm continue.
The Fool © Heidi Richardson Evans 2019
