Man, I remember that day clear as a bell. I was sitting at my messy desk, coffee gone cold, staring at my laptop screen, feeling this heavy, invisible wall right in front of me. I had this big project, something I’d poured weeks into, and suddenly, it just stopped dead. No ideas flowing, no motivation, just pure, unadulterated stuck-ness. I figured, okay, a quick tarot pull, maybe some insight would pop up. And there it was. The Hanged Man, completely reversed.
I swear, my stomach dropped. I knew what that usually hinted at – resistance, feeling trapped, refusing to make sacrifices, or just plain stubbornness in seeing things from a fresh angle. And boy, did that hit home. I’d been grinding, pushing, forcing myself to look at the same lines of code, the same design mock-ups, for days, trying to brute-force a solution. But it wasn’t working. It felt like I was actively refusing to let go of my old approach, even though it was clearly leading nowhere.
For a good few days after that pull, I just felt worse. The block didn’t lift; it solidified. I tried everything I usually do. I sat down with my journal, trying to write out the problem, hoping the words would untangle something in my brain. Nothing. Just more frustration. I went for long walks, hoping the fresh air and movement would shake something loose. Nope, just walked in circles, mentally speaking. I even tried those “power naps” everyone talks about, figuring maybe a reset would do it. Woke up feeling even groggier and more defeated.
I was just spinning my wheels, you know? Burning through my energy, feeling more and more useless. It wasn’t just that the project was stuck; I felt stuck. Like my whole brain was refusing to cooperate. Every time I looked at that reversed Hanged Man card I’d left on my desk, it just felt like it was mocking me. “See? Told ya. You’re refusing to let go, aren’t ya?”
Then, one Tuesday evening, just when I was about to give up and watch some mindless TV, something shifted. I wasn’t even actively thinking about the project or the card. I was just tidying up my desk, moving some old papers around, and I picked up an old sketchbook. I hadn’t doodled in ages. Usually, I’m all about the digital stuff now, but for some reason, that evening, I just felt like picking up a real pencil.
As I was just idly drawing some weird little monster, completely unrelated to work, an old memory popped into my head. My art teacher, back in high school, used to always say, “If you’re stuck on a drawing, turn it upside down. Look at it purely as shapes and lines, not as what it’s supposed to be.” And it was like a little light bulb went off, right there in my head. Turn it upside down. That’s what the Hanged Man usually does! But reversed, I was actively refusing to be in that upside-down position, refusing to see things from a completely different angle.
So, I decided right then and there. I wasn’t going to force myself to work on the project in the same way anymore. This wasn’t about taking a break; this was about a conscious pivot. I packed away my laptop, shut down all the project tabs, and just put everything related to it out of sight. I decided I was going to do something completely different for a while. Not just a day, not an hour, but properly, until something genuinely felt new.
Here’s what I actually did:
- I started dedicating an hour every day to that old sketchbook. No pressure, no goals, just drawing whatever came to mind. Mostly weird stuff, honestly.
- I pulled out some old books I’d been meaning to read – not tech books, just fiction, stories that could take my mind elsewhere.
- I decided to organize a different part of my apartment every day. A drawer, a shelf, the spice rack. Anything to make me move and focus on something outside the project.
And you know what? After about four or five days of this completely different routine, while I was sketching a ridiculously detailed tree trunk, a tiny, almost whisper of an idea sparked. It wasn’t the full solution to my project block, not by a long shot. But it was a new approach. A completely fresh angle I hadn’t even considered. It was about simplifying a particular function, breaking it down into something much smaller and easier to manage, instead of trying to build this huge, clunky thing.
It was like finally letting go of the rope and just allowing myself to hang there, to see the world from a completely different vantage point, that finally made the difference. That “block” wasn’t about lacking ideas; it was about stubbornly clinging to the way I thought those ideas needed to be executed. Once I actively stopped resisting the pause, stopped resisting the upside-down perspective, the actual path forward just appeared, almost effortlessly.
It taught me a huge lesson. Sometimes, when you get that Hanged Man reversed, the real block isn’t what you think it is. It’s not a lack of effort or skill. It’s a refusal to suspend your usual way of doing things, a stubborn grip on the conventional. You gotta let go of that grip, truly let go, and allow yourself to just be in that moment of suspension. That’s when the real breakthrough happens. That’s when you finally overcome the block and things start moving again, but this time, in a way that actually works.
