I thought I’d start the blog off with a series on tarot and anxiety. A lot of people are anxious right now, and it’s a subject I have a lot of experience with: anxiety has been a serious, life-altering problem for me for many years. And what better place to start a mental health discussion than with the Nine of Swords?
I like the Nine of Swords a lot more than I used to. It’s difficult sometimes, because the Nine of Swords is a pretty awful card: it represents insomnia, nightmares, mental illness, fear, all sorts of gross and terrible things. In a lot of decks, the Nine of Swords is drawn to look actively repellent – disgusting, decaying, horrifying. And the person in the Rider-Waite image above is clearly having a very bad time.
But I like it.1 I like it because it’s been very meaningful to me as I’ve struggled with an anxiety disorder. For me, the absolute heart of anxiety is a belief that I can’t tolerate bad feelings. An idea that fear, shame, anger, sadness – all very Nine-of-Swords-y things – will utterly destroy me, and that if I am the person in that picture, it’s all over. This was a big epiphany for me, when I first figured it out: I truly was afraid of feelings! When I’m anxious about something – a date, paying my taxes, the possibility that I will fail at literally anything – I’m not anxious about the thing itself, I’m anxious that it’ll make me feel bad. Because if I wouldn’t feel bad, there’d be no reason to be anxious.
1. Sometimes.
So for me, part of the solution to the problem of chronic, debilitating anxiety – anxiety that freezes me in place, keeps me awake at night, creeps through my body and leaves my face numb, my hands twitching, my stomach hurting – is to make friends with the Nine of Swords. Get to know shame, and fury, and despair, and regret and frustration and grief. Spend time with them. Let them out, instead of locking them way deep down where they lurk for decades, angry at being ignored.
The Nine of Swords is a terrifying enemy, and it’s so, so hard to move towards it instead of away. But I’ve found that the closer I can get, the less scary it becomes. It’s slow, and difficult, and often it just sucks. But when it works, when I can hug that overwrought person who’s crying in the dark instead of shoving them away, I find a truly profound openness, ease, and joy.
Minor Arcanas 