Being a witch is a man's job, that's why it needs women to do it.

The Shepherd's Crown - Terry Pratchett

I have more therapy homework this week. I started with the easy bit to warm myself up. This morning I woke up thinking about what else I have to do and found myself feeling extremely resistant to it. Then I read Ella Risbridger’s latest Substack post and it unlocked the permission I needed to explore what I needed to look at. I had been standing at the door, feeling scared and wondering whether to knock and then she just wandered up to me and gave me the key.

I love Ella’s writing. I have been hunting down her words ever since I discovered her writing about lipstick in Grazia and found myself crying at the beauty of it all. She writes about lipstick, she writes about chicken, she writes about gardens, she writes about velvet dresses and packet ramen and through it all she writes about grief and love and the fragile, chaotic complexity of what it means to be alive. It is magical. She is magical.

The post is about the rituals of New Year, about poetry and about tarot cards. She says:

I also believe Tarot is completely genuinely magic, that somehow these cards I bought off Amazon and printed in China know truths about my life I have not yet unlocked. But you don’t need that for it to work. You just need to go in with an open heart and willingness to listen to whatever story the cards bring you. If you go in sceptical, or hoping that it will go wrong, or trying to prove it doesn’t work, it won’t work. I don’t know why this is so! But I have done tarot for a lot of people and always when someone is trying to make a point with it it’s useless noise. You have to be willing to look for the story; to interrogate the story.

My homework is to reconnect to the magic within me and figure out how to integrate it into the life I want to lead, to allow it to support me better. Tarot is a big part of that for me, but I have been resisting it for a long time.

I love the cards for the way that they help me think about things without the noise and clutter that accompanies most other kinds of thinking. They help to show me interconnected threads that I might otherwise blunder through and snap before I can figure out where they lead. They help me to connect one situation with another. So many times when it looks like something new and daunting is on the horizon I am shown another situation that reminds me that I’ve been here before and I have the tools and resources I need. Sometimes I can only see the beginning of a story, but that’s all I need to start. The cards help me make stories, and stories are things that I understand, where actual life sometimes seems utterly chaotic and impenetrable.

When you have a story, you can read it any way you like. You can change perspective, character and direction. You can say ‘what if?’ What if I didn’t marry the handsome prince? What if I took that path instead of this one? What if I began again at the middle?

One of the things I do with my tarot cards is interrogate them. If a card is reversed I ask myself if it’s alright to right it. If it isn’t, I ask what is stopping me from changing my perspective? When it’s a person, I ask whether that’s an aspect of me I need to meet or someone else that I need to listen to? A spread allows me to play within the story and figure out which bits are important or non-negotiable and which bits I can change if I want. If I don’t get an answer to a question, I ask myself: ‘If I knew the answer to this, would I find a way to fuck this up for myself?’ The answer is so often yes.

Laying a spread and wandering around in it is very much like a therapy session. It is never about absolutes for me. The cards offer no certainty. It’s all about exploration. It is about having agency and reminding myself that the future is so rarely as clear or inevitable as I think. It is a way to remind me that there is more than one route out of the forest of death and fear. It is a way to give myself a chance at finding the tools I need to do what comes next, or even decide if I want to do what comes next.

Reading the cards for me, is an act of hope. It is a gift. As I write this, I wonder why I so often refuse to allow myself that hope, or to give myself this gift. That seems like a very cruel thing to do. I am beginning to realise, as I pick through the daily puzzles that therapy throws up that I have a gift for self sacrifice. No doubt tied to the giant, heavy burden of the mother archetype I’ve been dragging around for so long. As I came out of therapy with my list of tasks, I wondered where the jumble of stepping away from the mother and into myself connected with exploring magic. Now I know.

The cards are, as Risbridger points out, just card printed in a factory in China. They’re not intrinsically magic. I think of them as tools for focus, like a myriad of different lenses to look through. What is magic is what comes from inside of me when I calm down and shift my thoughts and attention. The magic is me. The cards just help me translate it outside of the mind that is noisy with anxiety and to do lists.

I stopped reading the cards for a long while. I put them away for a whole raft of reasons. A lot of it, now that I think about it, was to do with fear. I shut down that part of my life and when I did open it up from time to time, I always did it for other people or because someone wanted to pay me. There is nothing wrong with being paid for readings, but for me it was the wrong reason to start again. I had the relationship wrong. Other people got the magic and I got the money, when it was me that needed the magic all along. I started this journey by giving the magic away and then wondered why I was never satisfied.

I am most comfortable with reading cards, but there are other things I can do. I can shift blocked energy for people. I can do a kind of healing. I can read things that aren’t cards. I can know things about people and situations that aren’t explicable in everyday terms. I have explored these from time to time and stuffed them away again, like a dirty secret. I so often flirt round the edges of what this part of me is, but I have never really taken the time to unpack it properly. It has felt unsafe. Over and over I have been drawn to this aspect of my life and turned around. Now I want to keep walking forwards. I think it’s possible now that I am building myself some safe spaces to do it in.

My therapist asked about my relationship with it. I explained that I found it hard to figure it out and I found other people’s reactions frustrating. She very gently said: ‘Do you think you might be projecting your fears and difficulties with accepting it onto other people and you’re just getting what you’re transmitting?’ Hence the homework. Of course, she is right.

What Risbridger’s writing gifted me this morning was the ease with which she writes about things that I have found dangerous or exposing or fearful. She actively and lushly enjoys this part of her life with no apologies. I want that. I want what she’s having. For me, for once, it can’t start with the writing. I’ve written about this part of my life so many times and never changed a damn thing. Looking back, I think I’ve been writing in the hope that someone will give me permission to be this person, to make it ok for me. Nobody is going to do that for me, except me. It seems so obvious, but then so much revelation is. I think it starts with gifting myself permission.

I think I have stalled at the jump for so long in case I find out things that I can’t unknow. I’m not talking about things like whether someone is having an affair or anything as mundane as that. Part of the knowing is about how powerful I can be if I own my stuff and how that might change the life I have fitted into, because this knowing is not the fitting in kind of knowing. It’s the standing out kind of knowing. It’s the sort of knowing that once you have it, doesn’t let you forget it. I have, for a very long time, squashed myself down to fit into the world. What happens when I let myself take up space? I guess I’m going to find out.