lesson 44: when you figure out you’ve been on the wrong path

This is another week where I’m serving you a second attempt. Attempt #1 wasn’t bad, but it became so focused on Reiki—something that I can’t shake from my main topic of conversation, lately—that I felt like most of you would find it dull. Not, of course, that I have much evidence anyone is reading these! 🤣

This week, I’m christening Gergely Bagameri’s Hidden Tales Tarot 2025. GB is on instagram as TarotMidnight. I’m such a fan of his decks, the production quality the sharpness of the line art are quite satisfying. I accept the critique that his decks feature only white characters, but in the case of the decks they actually don’t have “white” skin; they have paper white skin, in the sense that they are the color of the background. This deck actually offers people in the tone of warm gray, but a look at them will demonstrate that their features aren’t entirely “caucasian.” Not to defend the preponderance of whiteness in tarot, merely to point out that there is more to ethnicity than skin tone. 

At any rate, our arc of five shakes out as follows:
Queen of Wands (4), King of Cups (2), 10 of Coins (1), Wheel of Fortune (3), Ace of Wands (5). 

Ten is a deliciously wicked number in tarot, because are we dealing with something being over or something just begun? Can’t be both, though the number can sometimes indicate the moment between one thing ending and another starting. And we have two tens in this spread, including the Wheel. The artist opted for Roman numerals on the majors but Arabic numerals on the minors—and the X of the Wheel makes me think “OVER!” — like the X’s on Family Feud. Big old crunchy crank sound telling you YOUR ANSWER WAS NOT AMONG OUR TOP TEN. 

Another thing worth pointing out: the images on this dark are sparse, and that can freak out readers because there’s nothing to rescue them. But I think that if you’re open to such sparseness, it can in fact rescue you as much (if not more—and I think more) than having dense, packed imagery. Consider—when an image is distilled to something simple, everything becomes more prominent. This Ten of Coins gives us an exterior view of a walled city, with an apparition of 10 coins neatly arrayed above it. The city isn’t closed; the wall features large arches, and beyond we see the institutional buildings (a steeple and indication of spire suggest a church—but even something about the angle of the silhouette also implies a dome (there isn’t really one, but it feels like there is). 

There’s the suggestion that access is now granted. “Sure,” the city says, “come on in.” And it’s tempting. Look at all that money. But, somehow . . . , it’s not what we want, anymore. The sun is setting on this particular destination (hence the city being backlit—we don’t need the actual sunset to tell us that). Actually, the sun (we might say) has broken itself up from a major single entity to ten, much smaller, much less powerful, much more banal “suns.” This reminds of Elphaba’s line in “Defying Gravity”: “I don’t want it—no, I can’t want it anymore.” We change, and what once seemed glamorous and full of promise no longer holds the lure. And, of course, that is precisely the moment the goal becomes accessible. “Oh, yeah, if you still want this, you can gave it, I guess.” 

“Why?”

“No one else wants it, anymore, either.” 

Typically I work from the center out, but today I’m compelled by the two royals on the left to move next to that point. Initially I wanted to call the Queen of Wands and King of Cups gatekeepers, but actually the expressions on their faces tell a different story. There’s a great deal of anxiety in these depictions—more so in the king, but the queen offers a flicker of a furrowed brow. “Ah, my creative drive and energy have led me to this goal. I’ve accepted my abilities, I’ve accepted even my ability to mentor others . . . and, though it hasn’t been easy, I’ve reached the pinnacle of emotional intelligence. I know what many others can’t. And yet . . . why do I feel so worried?”

All that glitters isn’t gold, perhaps. 

The Wheel and the Ace of Wands point out that while we were working toward something, almost totally devoted to it, we were also changing dramatically. In fact, we may have been aware that we were changing and actively attempted to hide it from ourselves (the walled garden in the 10, which is full of “holes”)—we couldn’t really hide it, but we did a really good job deceiving ourselves, which is why we’re so worried. 

There’s a fear in life that time spent doing something that doesn’t turn out to be a longterm thing is wasted. A college degree in art history, a class in pottery, a weeklong master class with some Hollywood actor—all of these are valid and useful (as well as tax deductible) for people who make those things pay. For anyone else, it was just a waste of money. All those years spent working toward the movie contract or the book deal or the C-suite, and suddenly it’s not what it promised years ago. It was supposed to be the golden ticket and it turns out to be just a white elephant. We can reach the top of the heap, so to speak, or near it—and realize, that wasn’t what we wanted at all. 

This is more common that you’d think, and my guess is that you’ve had one or two of these moments in your life. The relationship with the perfect person who turned out to be far from perfect, and even far less of a good partner than whoever was broken up with to date this one. The job with the title and the pay and the influence that was the reason we were put on the earth, which turns out to be draining our energy and leaving us unwilling to do anything other than work. The art show at the gallery with the audience and the review in the New York Times . . . that turns out to be scathing and (seemingly) career-ending. We can reach the brass ring and discover it wasn’t even brass—just shiny plastic. And it’s not because the thing wasn’t always that way. It’s just that, by mistake, we grew up. The King of Cups is so nonplussed because he realizes—or thinks, anyway—“Fuck, I wanted this kingdom, and now it’s just . . . another outpost full of ungovernable citizens who, somehow, aren’t the solution to all my problems.”

Somehow, the target always becomes hittable at the moment we realize we don’t want to hit it, anymore. 

So what then?

Despair, generally. And that Ten of Coins, with this mournful silhouette and disintegrating sun gives way to the Wheel — and we all know what that means.

But this is a myth. Or anyway, the myth is that the time was wasted. 

If you know me, you know I’m pro-learning. Explore as much as you can and take what you can from it. Even if it doesn’t turn out to be “the thing,” you’ve still learned something. Skills are rarely applicable to only one part of our life. So often we undervalue our talents because we think they’re too niche. Sitting in interviews, I often hear formerly stay-at-home parents trying to re-enter the job market explain that they’re probably a little rusty. Nonsense. If you’ve raised a child, you can lead a team of customer service support agents. You probably don’t want to use the same vocal cadences (adults tend not to enjoy their boss using baby talk), but the psycho-manipulative tactics that get kids to clean their rooms are the same ones that get employees to clean their inbox. 

All learning is valuable and nearly all (I think all) is transferrable. 

Recently, I hosted a resume and cover-letting writing workshop for the Women’s Empowerment group in my office. A few folks asked if I’d take a look at their resumes afterward, and of course I agreed. Many of them told me some version of, “I think I’d like to get into project management—but I know that’s a field you need a certification in and I don’t have any experience doing it.” And it’s true. They lack the credential (which, frankly, is often an arbitrary gatekeeper—most of of the PM’s I know can’t remember what they even did in their courses, because they’re mostly passive learning), but I can see the skills for project management all over the resume. There in job history #1 will be the skill of holding a team accountable; in job history #3, we find the skill of presenting to executives; in jobs #4 and 5, we discover the the candidate worked with several versions of Gantt chart databases, which is one common way projects are tracked. 

No, they may not “be” project managers—but they’re capable of it, if they can understand how to communicate to a hiring manager that the skills required are already in their toolkit and already have proven effective. 

There’s actually a way of writing your resume that de-centers work history and centers skills. (Search the web for skill-based resumes and you’ll find tutorials and examples.) I rarely see anyone use them, which is too bad—because hiring managers aren’t actually very good at drawing those lines themselves. That’s mostly because they have a lot on their plate and there are five candidates and they want everyone to get the one job they have to offer. But, as I said to these folks after our resume review, you’re not not a PM—you just need to write your resume in a way that tells that story. (It’s out of scope for this blog, but I cannot tell you how powerful a great cover letter can be, too, when you want to do a career change.)

We don’t have any swords—writing/communicating—in this spread. And so, we’re likely stuck in the same boat as folks looking to switch fields. We know what we don’t want anymore, but now that we know we don’t want it, we don’t know what we do want nor do we know how to get there. And we also worry that once we get there, it’ll turn out to be another dud. And so what is there to do?

Well, there’s one card we haven’t talked about yet. The Ace of Wands. 

Aces, like tens, sit in a liminal space—but I definitely don’t think of them as conclusions. The trick with the ace is to discover whether it’s a seed that’s been planted and is receiving food and water . . . or if it’s still in a packet, dry and waiting for life. And I like how this ace is actually sorta looking—side eye—back at the rest of the spread, lugging this big old scepter behind him (I typically don’t gender aces, but this one has a peepee). Because I felt like it, I drew the next card in the deck to dangle from the ace and received The Devil. Which made me laugh, because I don’t like this particular Devil. As you likely know by now, that is one of my favorite cards and I don’t like to see him destroyed—as seems to be happening, here. But what’s quite cute is that the ace shows a cupid/angel, while the Devil of course shows a devil (being tread on by a warrior—some Roman, evidently). 

The suppression of our devil—our deepest, core self—is actually one of the reasons we find ourselves on the wrong path in life. We buy certain myths about what we’re supposed to want and over time we stifle the things we really wanted. My mother wanted to be a teacher when she was school-aged and everyone told her, “Oh, there’s too many teachers, don’t do that.” So, she didn’t. She got mistreated by retail employers for her career until a disability pushed her to retire—which was also a battle with those retailers, who always want to deny people who have worked their lives toiling in their shiny sweatshops their disability claims.

Because of this card, we do have a sword now—and it’s being used to bludgeon (with logic and realism) our true nature. The sword in this card is serving not communication and learning, but intellectual snobbery. “Anything low to the ground should be stepped on, and anything I don’t like is low to the ground.”

When we partner with the ace, what happens?

I frequently think about the qualities of the suit objects—in this case swords vs. wands or clubs. A club is a far less refined weapon, given to serfs and peons, while swords are for the gentry and anyone who can afford them. Swords are status symbols; wands/clubs, they’re blunt objects. But what we have here is the difference between buying into the elitist lies (the swords) and following our innate spirit (wands—fire). We are generally better off when we listen to our gut, which is basically what this reading is saying: once you get where you thought you wanted to be and discover you don’t want to be there, listen to your gut for the next stops. Essentially, what you wanted before you were told you can’t want that might actually be the key to finding whatever it is you’re looking for. The actual goal, rather than the goal you accepted because you were told you had to. 

And this is important, friends, because when we do have those moments where we realize we’ve been working don’t something that actually isn’t great . . . we feel depressed. We feel like a failure. Much of modern life is designed to support that feeling, including the way hiring processes make it so difficult to get a job doing something different from what you were doing in the last job. We pigeonhole everyone because it’s easier. But when we reach a destination only to discover we don’t want to be there, we are lucky! We’ve eliminated a possibility and now we can—trusting our gut—figure out where we need to be. Taking a wrong turn in life isn’t a failure. It’s only a failure if we refuse to see and accept it and try to get out of it. Otherwise, it’s what’s supposed to happen in life: we try things and see if they work, and when they don’t we try other things. 

But when it’s time to return to other things, we need to return to our core self, our deepest self, and the things we really wanted when we first believed that anything was possible. This, by the way, is not to say that if you wanted to be a major league baseball player and you realize in your late 40’s that’s what you should have done that you should then make it your goal to make it to “the show.” That’s . . . just not gonna happen (although it has happened that players who are typically too old to be drafted and who thought they missed their chance have wound up in playing in the majors). But what is it about baseball that made it such an attractive career back before you go talked about of being good enough for it? 

Simon Sinek, leadership author and speaker, talks about finding your “why” — the thing that is your essential motivator in life, not just work — and he has a useful way of discovering it. You can read his books for more. But if you look at what you wanted to be when you were a kid, and then you look not at the thing itself but at what it was that made you want to do it, the qualities and possibilities, you will likely both figure out what tends to motivate you (kids are shockingly well-attuned to their engines) and what you would be happy doing (if we’re thinking about jobs). You liked baseball because of its athleticism while maintaining a slow pace, you liked the hand-eye coordination and the team aspect that also allowed “aces to shine.” You liked the coaching culture, the routine, and the travel. And armed with all that, you discover that working for a corporate coaching company that travels to different places to do onsite workshops scratches all the itches that baseball did as a child. 

That’s what this reading is saying. When you’re not sure what to do next because you and life changed on you, go back to your core, to your gut. Listen to it and find clues there for what you wanted to do next. And if you can do that, you’re a far shot better than most people are!

This blog is of course about divination and I seem to be making this mostly about the corporate culture of career changing. But one of the times in my life I experienced this kind of realization that I wasn’t where I wanted to be was with my tarot reading. And that was when I started doing the work that eventually became Tarot on Earth. Rather than downward spiraling or giving up, which is very me, I dug deep and followed my gut. In short order, a lot of my confidence issues and hangups had resolved and I’d gotten exponentially closer to the reader I wanted to be. The more I follow that tactic, the closer and closer I get to that ideal. I know I’ll never reach it, but I also know that my gut is a good guide—and that I know bullshit when I see it, even if I’m the one trying to pawn it off. 

When you realize you’re not where you want to be, listen to your gut and it will show you how to get there. 


A Read of One’s Own

1. An area of my life I have reached an impasse because I’ve clung to something I actually don’t want or need. 
2. What my gut is trying to tell me about this. 
3. Advice on how to follow my gut’s advice.