Man, I gotta tell you, this past quarter felt like I was walking around under my own personal thundercloud. Everything I touched turned into a hassle. I’m talking about a specific issue here—this damn server migration project I’ve been trying to push through. Every time I thought I had the budget approved, or the team aligned, some new piece of crap requirement would drop, or some key guy would suddenly go on vacation. It was pure, unadulterated blockage.
Setting the Stage for the Reversal
I usually don’t dive into the cards for work stuff, but I was so stressed out one Tuesday night, staring at my perpetually delayed project timeline, I just snapped. I remembered the old deck I kept hidden in the drawer. It wasn’t about finding an answer; it was about changing the energy. I decided, right then and there, I was going to pull a card to figure out if this cycle of frustration was ever going to break.
The first thing I did was clear the mess off my dining table. You need clean space for this kind of thing, right? I grabbed the deck—an old Rider-Waite, slightly sticky from years of neglect—and just started shuffling. I shuffled it until my wrist ached. I wasn’t asking a specific question, just demanding clarity: “Why is this hell cycle not ending, and what do I do about it?”
I decided on a simple spread, not some complex Celtic Cross nonsense. Just three cards: The immediate past, the current block, and the projected outcome. I cut the deck roughly in half, laid the pile back together, and started pulling.
- Card 1 (Past): The Five of Pentacles.
- Card 2 (Current Block): The Eight of Swords.
- Card 3 (Outcome): The Seven of Spades.
Now, the Five of Pentacles? That was spot on. Feeling left out in the cold, lacking resources, that was the initial budget fight. The Eight of Swords? Total self-imprisonment, feeling trapped by circumstances I thought were outside my control. Accurate, too. I was definitely stuck in my own head about how impossible this migration was.
Facing the Seven of Spades Head-On
Then I flipped the third card. It was the Seven of Spades, man. And it was completely upside down. Reversed.
Now, if you know the Seven of Spades (or Swords, depending on your deck), you know it’s the card of sneakiness, of getting away with something, of deception, or cutting corners. It’s the ‘running away with five swords while leaving two behind’ card. Basically, it screams “failure through dishonesty” or “cutting losses badly.” Seeing that for my ‘Outcome’ card initially made my stomach drop. I thought, “Great, the project is going to fail, and I’m going to look like a complete idiot.”
But wait. It was reversed.
I pulled out the tiny, useless booklet that came with the deck, but that thing just gives you three vague words. So I put it aside. I sat back and stared at the card itself. Reversed. Upside down.
I started turning the card’s meaning on its head. If the upright card is about trying to get away with something sneaky and probably getting caught, the reversal has to be about stopping the sneaking, right? It’s about realizing your own flawed strategy.
I realized the ‘sneaking’ wasn’t about being malicious; it was my constant effort to sidestep protocol, to cheap out on essential components, and to try and force this migration using minimal resources, hoping no one would notice the corners I was cutting. I was running a shoddy operation, trying to ‘get away’ with doing things the hard, cheap way, and the universe was punishing me for it by blocking me at every turn.
The Action Plan and the Payoff
This was the real moment the bad luck stopped. It wasn’t the card doing magic; it was the card forcing me to see my own stupidity. The Reversed Seven of Spades wasn’t predicting failure; it was demanding radical honesty and telling me to stop trying to cheat the system.
The next morning, I walked straight into my manager’s office. I didn’t mince words. I admitted that my current approach was flawed, that I had been trying to make an impossible budget work, and that the project needed serious realignment. I put all my cards on the table—no pun intended.
- I requested the actual, necessary budget increase, justifying every penny.
- I stopped trying to manage the entire migration myself and instead pushed for hiring the external consultant we desperately needed.
- I publicly owned the delays, focusing on correcting the path rather than assigning blame.
It was terrifying, admitting failure like that. But guess what? The budget was approved, the consultant was hired within a week, and suddenly, the bureaucratic friction that had been blocking me for three months just evaporated. It turned out the “bad luck” was just the universe physically restraining me from making bad decisions.
The bad luck was over not because a magic card reversed, but because I finally stopped trying to pull off a sketchy, doomed strategy. The Reversed Seven of Spades gave me the courage to stop running away and face the truth. Project is now on track. Sometimes the solution to getting unstuck isn’t finding a loophole; it’s finally admitting that the path you’re on is just crap, and then actually doing something honest about it.
