Man, last month I hit a real emotional skid. Everything looked okay from the outside. The bills were paid, I was hitting my deadlines, I was even managing to pretend I enjoyed that Zoom meeting about optimizing workflow. But inside? Total static. I felt completely hollow, like someone had taken a sponge to my insides. I knew I was supposed to be feeling something good, but the switch was definitely stuck in the off position.
I have this habit, you know? Every morning I pull one card, just to get a vibe check for the day. And for about three solid days straight, I kept pulling the same damn thing: The Ace of Cups. Reversed.
I Stopped Reading About Joy and Started Testing It
I read the basic interpretations, of course. Emotional dryness. Blocked intuition. A general sense of disappointment or repression. But just reading that didn’t help me fix the issue. It felt too vague. It was like reading a manual on how to fix a leaky faucet but refusing to pick up a wrench. I decided to treat this card not as a prediction, but as a goddamn engineering diagnostic.
I figured the reversal meant the feeling wasn’t flowing correctly. Either I was forcing it out the wrong way, or I was repressing something important that needed to come up. So I grabbed a fresh notebook, not for general feelings, but for specific, verifiable data points regarding my attempted joy.
The first thing I did was establish two columns every night before bed. Column A: Moments I genuinely felt a slight lift, no matter how small or stupid. Column B: Moments I should have felt happy, but only felt pressure or emptiness. This was the meat of the practice.
For three days, Column B filled up way faster. It wasn’t major crises; it was tedious stuff.
- I tracked how I felt after responding to social media comments. (Result: Tired, judged, worried about how the next post would land. Zero joy.)
- I forced myself to spend time with a friend who always complained, because I felt obligated. (Result: My emotional battery felt totally drained afterwards. The cup was empty.)
- I bought something expensive I thought would excite me. (Result: Brief flicker of excitement, immediately followed by buyer’s remorse and the worry about fitting it into my budget. The joy was counterfeit.)
I realized the problem wasn’t that I lacked the capacity for joy. The reversal wasn’t about an empty cup; it was about a cup with holes poked in the bottom. All the good emotional stuff I tried to pour in was leaking out due to obligation and comparison.
The Messy Discovery: Comparison is the Leak
The major realization hit me hard when I was watching this totally harmless movie—a comedy, something light. I caught myself analyzing the main character’s life instead of enjoying the plot. The character had a cool apartment and a job that seemed easy. My brain, completely unbidden, started calculating why my apartment wasn’t that nice and why my job felt harder.
I literally paused the movie. I wrote down the feeling. It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t depression. It was just aggressive, competitive comparison. I was taking something designed purely for light entertainment and using it as a yardstick to measure my own shortcomings. That comparison was the acid eating away at the container of my joy.
My cup wasn’t dry; I was actively using all my emotional energy to keep up appearances and benchmark myself against standards that weren’t even real. The Ace of Cups Reversed wasn’t warning me that I had no love or happiness coming in. It was screaming that I was rejecting the genuine stuff because I was too busy chasing the loud, flashy, manufactured version of happiness that society shoves down your throat.
Sealing the Cracks, Not Trying to Overfill
I immediately shifted my practice. I stopped meditating on “finding joy” and started focusing on “plugging the holes.”
This meant ruthlessly cutting out anything that made me feel obligated to perform. I started saying “no” without apology. If a friend wanted to vent, and I wasn’t up for it, I simply said, “Not today, I don’t have the bandwidth.” It felt rough at first, like being selfish, but instantly I noticed my internal energy staying contained.
I deleted the social media apps I knew fed the comparison monster. I stopped reading articles about “10 ways to achieve ultimate fulfillment.” That stuff is just noise that makes you feel bad for not achieving someone else’s goal.
The result? It wasn’t instant euphoria. It was much quieter. I felt a subtle, steady level of contentment that I hadn’t felt in months. When I stopped worrying about the volume of the joy, and just focused on the integrity of the container, the real, simple stuff—a good cup of coffee, finishing a tough chapter, a quiet walk—finally started to land.
The Ace of Cups Reversed didn’t mean disaster. It meant the foundation was flawed. And sometimes, you just have to roll up your sleeves and do the messy repair work yourself to stop the damn leaking.
