the 8 of swords, the hanged man and the wheel :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JUNE 11th 2024

Dear soft heart,

On May 21st, I celebrated 7 years sober. What a gemini thing to do- getting sober as soon as gemini season starts.

When I pulled cards to see what is asking for attention to be expanded or integrated, I pulled, the 8 of swords, the hanged man and the wheel of fortune.

My relationship with sobriety is unique in the sense that I did not choose to start being addicted to what I ended up being addicted to – ativan — a brand name for the benzodiazepine lorazepam. I became what is considered an involuntary addict. I was 12 going on 13 when I was first given my first ativan prescription because I was having really bad panic attacks and couldn’t function very well due to constant overstimulation related to my then undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, and at that age, you cannot consent properly, and to be fair, I also do not think proper informed consent was given to my parents either. If it was, it was not communicated with me in any way that I retained. Informed consent would have entailed understanding the potential consequences of taking ativan in general, things like side effects, and the potential consequences of long term use which is that ativan is quite habit forming and can cause physical dependence1.

First, let me say that I am also not inherently opposed to ativan as a really good piece of medicine when you need it. In fact, I think ativan is absolutely excellent. It works extremely well for what it’s supposed to do. What’s bizarre is that while I got addicted to it, I would for sure not be here today if it weren’t for ativan. Ativan saved my life. I also understand the nuances around taking ativan for conditions that can be managed with the use of it (something like seizures,) and how devastating not having access to ativan could be in these cases. It’s just the way that I used ativan, and what I used it for, and how long I used it for was ultimately problematic for me.

In short, I didn’t fully understand the impacts taking the drug could have on me when I began taking it, and by the time I did, my body could not do very well without it.

The withdrawal of it is also extremely dangerous, and if you aren’t informed of that properly, oh no. It’s a terribly scary thing to go through – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

Now, 7 years out, I often lose contact with just how difficult it was to get sober because it is starting to feel like a distant memory – the withdrawal. This is a welcome thing, and I also need to make sure that I honor the brave journey of sobriety and pause to reflect on my sober birthdays.

I took it for around 10 years. Even more sad, I took it for 10 years whilst I was developing. What’s devastating to realize about the magnitude of that is for example, ativan sedated me through my puberty. This meant I did not have access to my own proper desires or any real sense of my yums or yucks.

What’s also tricky about my specific ativan usage is that it was used by me to manage my autism. My first autistic burn out happened when I was in high school and this is when my ativan use got very severe. The ativan made GABA for me in my brain, so I could reach parasympathetic a bit easier when the world made it impossible for me to.

Last spring, I got into clinical regression therapy and a lot of my sessions would have me regressing back to these moments in high school where I didn’t want to take the pill, but I had to because I could not survive without it.

The problem, of course, is that in withdrawal, your body does not make any more GABA on its own by that time, and you do not have the pill making it for you, so you are left with no way to make GABA, which was probably one of the worst things I will ever go through in my life. I only slept for 10-20 minutes per day (yes you read that right. – 10-20 minutes PER DAY) for many weeks at the beginning of withdrawal and the rest of that first year, I slept on average a few hours per day total. Unfortunately, at the time, I did not have much physical or financial support from family, and I had to keep functioning once I was past the initial hospitalization stage, and thus perform on 2-3-4 hours of sleep max per day. It was hell on earth. I am sure my body is still recovering from that. I think part of my burn out in the past year has been due to this as well – a cumulative stress load that eventually I just could not carry any more.

The 8 of swords talks to us about oppression. There are swords surrounding the character in the card, 8 of them of course, and the person is tied up and blind folded, but they are not tied to any of the swords. No swords are piercing them either (like in the 10 of swords), and there is no one around. Now, this could be seen as a good thing, the people who tied this person aren’t there anymore to cause any further harm, meaning something is over. But also, there is no one there to help them get unbound either, which means they are suffering post traumatically. What happened to them?

I interpret the 8 of swords as a reflection that someone has been through a lot (the swords surrounding them shows this). And because it’s the swords suit, I consider that these things they went through were most likely violent, whether that be emotionally, physically or spirituality. Sometimes all three. It is clear there has been an injustice of some kind, or something that’s been handled wrong, as this person most likely did not do this to themselves (who would?)

In the distance in the 8 of swords card, we see a castle, what we could assume would be shelter or even a nice place to land. But the character is not connected to such things. We could interpret this as they have been cast out of society, in their pain. Which is probably true, and chances are the pain was caused by the very society that cast them out. But also, they are not aware of any other options except suffering, because they have lost something to the swords that surround them.

So what is it that they have lost? Their eyesight one. The blindfold to me translates as a loss of vision, hope perhaps too; all they see is darkness. And they also have lost full mobility, they are tied up and can’t move their hands or torso very much. This brings our attention to the fact that there are limitations we are facing and asks us to explore how we feel about these limitations. The 8 of swords speaks to us about how we are after we’ve gone through something traumatic, and we are left to figure it out for ourselves.

In other words, we have been affected. And this is where we must start in sobriety. With the acknowledgement that there has been something difficult that has caused us deep pain in our lives and we have lost our ability to have hope and to move freely because of it, but if we look closely, there is still something available to us: our feet are not bound.

There can be terrible resistance to owning that we were affected by life in the real ways we have been. I think addiction is one of the most poetic ways to tell the world that it hurts too much, we can’t go on.

And I think this is also why sober birthdays are so tender and mean so much to people who have been addicts. Sober birthdays are moments in time where we get to say, it hurt too much, I could barely go on, but I somehow found the way to unbound myself. A sober birthday is a moment to celebrate and talk about the moment I realized my feet weren’t bound. The moments where I realized I did have access to something, even as I was very affected.

In the 8 of swords, there is a mysterious invitation that we can pick up on if we attune just enough that says if we can get creative, which is what sobriety asks of us, we can find a way to untie ourselves with what is still there in terms of internal resourcing or even external resourcing, then with that little bit of resource, we eventually can free our hands and then remove our blind folds entirely. The 8 of swords says, it’s over now, there is a great deal of pain from all that has happened, but you are still standing. Don’t give up.

The hanged man from the rider-waite deck

The hanged man hangs upside down before us to tell us to have patience with life, and that when we feel frustrated, there is a different way to look at the situation so that we don’t suffer as much. Or the solution we are seeking for is only found through pausing, taking a breather, and coming back with the willingness to try again but in a different way.

In this way, the hanged man is a companion that can orient us to the practice of sobriety – which at the core of it, is about meeting pain in a new way with different tools. He reminds us that there is enlightenment that can come from not doing the same thing we are used to doing, pausing and then going ahead again after we saw things from a different angle (upside down vs upside up.)

The pain that made me start taking benzo, the fact that I was autistic and had a very hard time regulating my nervous system in the face of trauma and incompatible sensory environments for myself, has not magically resolved in the past 7 years. I just have learnt to meet the pain differently. Each time I used to take a benzo when the pain would get too big, I now have other tools. They don’t always work as fast, or as well as a benzo does. And in fact, there are many times, when I obviously still wish I could have a benzo, but there are other options once I have looked at it from another angle to help myself. Ones that do not include severe inter-dose withdrawal and massive physical dependency that is dangerous for my overall health.

In sobriety, we are often called to embody the hanged man’s archetype over and over again to get through the days.

The wheel of fortune from the rider-waite deck

And now, the wheel of fortune wants a moment with us discussing sobriety. The wheel is one of the most elusive cards to me. It traditionally represents change, and the fact that there are seasons to everything in our existence.

The wheel of fortune elicits the most fear out of any card in the deck for me, even more so than the notorious tower, because I have often regarded it as so unpredictable. I am after all, a girl with autism.

As soon as I think I fully understand it, I read for someone or something in my own life, and it opens up a new meaning that I didn’t previously understand that gives more depth to this major arcana for me. Sometimes, I only understand the teaching of the wheel a year after it tried to convey something to me.

For a long time, the wheel taught me about how we do not have access to the entire spectrum of free will at all times, due to situations out of our control. Circumstances that we had no control over can inform our free will in ways that compromises it. Choice isn’t always equal. The wheel taught me that we are a part of a web, a wheel of life, something that was very important for me to understand as someone with a high internal locus of control.

If I do not pay attention and catch myself doing this, I will personally believe I am responsible for all things that have ever happened to me. And that is a sticky place to be in. Because if I think I am responsible for all things that have happened to me, I think I could have also stopped them if I knew better, or if I would have acted faster, or if I would have been smarter.

I play God, and I think that I could have spared myself all the pain I have lived, if I could have just been a bit better with knowing absolutely everything.

My going on Ativan and the impacts of it is not something I had much control over, but it never stopped me from trying to trace back my steps to what I could have done better to avoid the pain of it in totality.

Without this teaching of the wheel, I am prone to forget that I was a kid and that it’s a tall order to have assumed that I could have accessed the information I know now then. I don’t clock that a doctor prescribed this thinking it would help and perhaps didn’t give full informed consent because she was just trying to help the acute panic attacks I was having, rather than addressing a systemic whole or thinking big picture. I completely gap that the schools I attended did not provide good resources for me as a disabled kid and caused me a lot of harm. I bypass that my mom had to work two to three jobs at a time to make ends meet because she was not protected entirely financially post her divorce even though she was vulnerable by giving up her earning potential to raise her children during her marriage, so yeah, sometimes, it did end up being easier for her if she gave me an ativan, so she could sleep and show back up to work the next day.

I forget all the social, political, gender things that were involved at the time and I think, I should have known better and never taken the pills ever!

But the wheel reminds me: we make the choices we make because of the circumstances that we find ourselves in. In different circumstances, we make different choices. There is no use to do anything but understand where we’ve been – the wheel proposes that perhaps all choices are in fact adaptations to what is going on, and that we can’t always control everything that is going on, only how we adapt. And we must be kind to ourselves about this whole thing – life can be brutal at times; it is complicated and multi layered and it’s short but long somehow at the same time, and there are initiating events that we can’t wish away that shape who we are.

Being on ativan for as long as I was, and then getting sober 7 years ago is undoubtably something I cannot separate myself from in my life.

Lately, the wheel has been teaching me that we can only try things and see what happens. You spin the wheel, and who knows where it will land. But if you do not spin the wheel, nothing happens.

Living immobilized is no way to live. Being so risk averse that you never engage with life, or with new things is a sure recipe for life that doesn’t feel like you made it.

And if I really think about the essence of sobriety for me it’s that I made my life, I chose it because I spun the wheel and I said, okay, I want this, I want to be sober, and then it landed somewhere.

Such is life. We go ahead with something, and we see where we end up as we do it. Sometimes our journeys are less linear than we’d like them to be. Sometimes, they are zig-zags, and sometimes, they are straight lines and we get these sober birthdays.

Sometimes you spin and it arrives somewhere it doesn’t work, so what? Spin again. Keep trying is what I feel the wheel whispers, in sobriety and in life.