This whole Tarot Death Reversed thing? Man, it hit me hard. For weeks, I’d been feeling this weird drag, like trying to run through water. Nothing was moving. I was stuck. Pulling that card in the reversed position—Death, usually meaning big, necessary change, but upside down—it wasn’t a shock. It was a massive, loud $text{wake-up call telling me I was actively resisting the inevitable}$.
I was watching my own life stall out, but I just froze. That’s what Death Reversed is all about: stagnation, inertia, clinging to a dead horse because you’re terrified of what happens when you finally let go of the reins.
I needed a life purge. I needed to move, now. I’m talking about a deep, messy clean-out of everything I knew was holding me back. And for me, that was my “passion project,” the one that paid the bills but was sucking the marrow out of my bones.
The Practice: Killing the “Unkillable” Grind
Let me take you back to how I got to that reading. This wasn’t some abstract mental block. It was concrete crap. I had a small consulting business—let’s call it ‘Idea X’—that I had been dragging for three years. It was stable, it was predictable, it was also a massive drain. Every morning I woke up, I felt a knot in my stomach. The clients were demanding, the work was repetitive, and the growth had flatlined six months prior. I knew I had to kill it to start something new, but the fear of a zero-balance bank account was a handcuff.
The night I did the reading, I knew I couldn’t just “think” about change anymore. I had to execute the change. I opened my laptop and started the process of deliberate, painful destruction.
- I shut down my main client channel first. I pulled up my email draft and wrote the severance letter to my top two most demanding, highest-paying clients. They were the anchors, and I had to cut the line completely. I didn’t negotiate. I didn’t offer a transition period past two weeks. I simply stated that ‘Idea X’ was closing shop and they needed to find a new partner. I hit send before I could talk myself out of it.
- Next, I deleted the entire project management board. I yanked the plug on three minor side-gigs that were just giving me anxiety. I logged into the payment processors and canceled all recurring subscription services related to ‘Idea X’. I cleaned out the project folders on my hard drive and moved them to a massive, labelled ‘Archive/Never Look At Again’ folder. I physically purged the space, tossing out three years of paper notes and files. I needed the physical proof of the death.
- Then came the hard part: The money. I calculated my runway. It was sixty-two days. Not much. I transferred the remaining small business account balance into my personal savings, shutting down the business account entirely. I accepted that the next two months would be a terrifying, ramen-noodle existence. I allowed myself to feel the panic, but I refused to revert.
The Shift: Forcing the New Life to Grow
The immediate fallout was exactly what I feared. My phone blew up for three days. Clients begged, yelled, and tried to bribe me back. I ignored them. I didn’t answer the calls. I let the emails sit unread. The panic was a real, physical gut punch every time I looked at my bank balance. But that panic was also the catalyst. It forced my hand.
I didn’t have time to waffle. With ‘Idea X’ dead and buried, I had to find something else, and fast. The Death Reversed energy I had been living under was finally, brutally, inverted into forward motion.
- I pulled out an old notebook—the one where I scribbled all the ideas I never had time for—and circled the one I had pushed aside for years: sharing these real-world breakdown logs, teaching people the messy side of business failure and rebooting. That’s this blog, what you’re reading right now.
- I spent the next few weeks building this platform, not focused on profit, but just on getting the stories out. I started writing every day, documenting the process of killing ‘Idea X’ and detailing the new rules I was implementing for myself.
- I connected with a few folks I’d always admired but never had the guts to talk to. That open sharing generated my first few small, high-quality, non-stressful consulting gigs in a totally new niche—the niche I had always wanted to be in.
The irony? About four months after I walked away, I heard through the grapevine that one of my biggest ‘Idea X’ clients, the one I thought I couldn’t survive without, had totally mismanaged their internal switchover and their entire platform had collapsed. They ran themselves into the ground because they refused to adapt or change their structure. The “Death” I was so afraid of executing on my own life happened to them instead, only they couldn’t control it. They resisted the necessary end until the end came for them anyway.
I pulled the same Death card just last week, and this time? It was upright. A clean ending, a complete metamorphosis. And I only got there because I refused to let the reversed energy hold me hostage. If you’re feeling that drag, that stagnation, that fear of the necessary end—don’t wait for the universe to do it for you. Act now. You’re already free, you just have to cut the ropes.
