I hit a wall hard last year with this huge side hustle I was trying to spin up. I mean, I was putting in crazy hours, maybe 80 hours a week, trying to get this thing profitable, but every time I thought I was ready to launch, some stupid dependency would break, or the market feedback would be total garbage, forcing me back to square one.
I kept pulling Tarot cards—just a simple daily draw to check the energy, you know? And for three weeks straight, I drew The Hanged Man Reversed. Every time. And I kept thinking, “Man, this is bad news. This is paralysis. This is self-sabotage. I’m stuck in negativity.”
The Initial Fight Against the Pause
The standard interpretation I had learned was that Reversed Hanged Man meant you were unwilling to make a necessary sacrifice or you were delaying the inevitable. But honestly, I interpreted it as the Universe telling me I was failing and needed to push harder. So, what did I do? I doubled down on the wrong strategy.
I mandated an aggressive launch date. I ignored the detailed, crucial feedback I was getting from my handful of early users who kept saying the foundation was wobbly. I bypassed the proper QA steps, thinking, “I’ll patch it later. Speed is key.” I was so fixated on not being stuck that I actively refused to accept that the project needed a time-out. I was terrified of delay because I thought delay meant doom.
My entire practice at that time was based on forcing things forward. I saw the reversal as a challenge to be overcome by sheer willpower.
- I overrode my team’s sensible objections.
- I skimped on structural integrity tests just to hit milestones.
- I invested more money into rushed marketing copy before the product was solid.
It was like I was running on an empty tank, yelling at the car to go faster. And guess what happened?
The Inevitable Crash and Forced Suspension
The launch was a total disaster. A catastrophic failure, actually. We launched, and within 48 hours, the whole backend imploded. We had major data corruption issues, user accounts were mixing up, and the service had to be pulled entirely. It wasn’t just a minor patch job; it was a full, system-wide retreat. We had to shut everything down. All that money, all those late nights, completely wasted.
That crash didn’t just stop the project; it forced me into a complete physical and mental break. I couldn’t look at the code for two weeks. I was burnt out, angry, and felt truly paralyzed—the very thing the card had warned me about. But here’s the kicker: the paralysis wasn’t caused by the card or the delay; it was caused by my resistance to the needed delay.
While I was sitting there, doing nothing, feeling like a massive failure, I finally had time to really look at the situation, completely upside down. I revisited the Hanged Man card itself. The upright image is about willing sacrifice and gaining a new perspective by turning things on their head. My failure was realizing I was resisting the sacrifice—the sacrifice of time, the sacrifice of my ego needing immediate success.
Embracing the Necessary Slowdown
That forced two-week pause was the true moment of clarity. It was the Universe kicking me into the Upright Hanged Man posture, even though I had drawn the Reversed. I finally understood that the “negative energy” in the Reversed card isn’t about failure; it’s the immense friction and pain created when you fight the universal truth that sometimes, you just have to wait, review, and look at the situation from a different angle.
My practice changed immediately. I stopped pushing.
When I finally came back to the project, here is what I implemented:
- I reframed the entire business model, ditching the parts that required massive resources right away.
- I established a strict “no launch before 99% confidence” rule, extending deadlines by three months.
- I began treating the required wait time not as downtime, but as necessary gestation and review time.
- I started asking, “What foundation piece am I trying to cheat right now?”
I learned to view the Reversed Hanged Man not as a prophecy of doom, but as a severe warning: “Stop struggling against the pause, or you will create a bigger mess.” The energy of the reversal is simply the consequence of being stuck in resistance. The simple way to embrace it and move forward? You stop fighting the delay. You stop viewing the sacrifice of immediate progress as a loss, and you start seeing it as the only way to gain the necessary perspective to build something solid.
We finally relaunched the side hustle, three months late, but rock solid. It’s working now, slowly building momentum, precisely because I accepted that necessary, uncomfortable pause. The Hanged Man Reversed isn’t always negative energy; it’s usually just a loud alarm telling you that the pain you’re feeling is self-inflicted because you refuse to tie yourself up and wait for the fog to clear.
