Queen of swords, and the woman the years made

FRIDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER

friday, and the week has used you up just enough that you can see yourself clearly, which does not always arrive feeling like a gift.

the queen of swords is the woman who got clear. she reads a situation quickly, she is difficult to fool, and she says the true thing when the room would prefer she did not. and this is very often not who she set out to be.

clarity like that is built out of something. a stretch where nobody was coming to help, a few years of having to be the one who noticed. it was earned and it is genuinely useful, and the shape it left behind can feel harder than the woman you had in mind at twenty five.

she is not a harder woman. she is a woman who stopped spending energy on being easy to be around, and a good deal of that energy is available for other things now. today is a reasonable day to work out what you would spend it on.

what is worth leaning into today: the accuracy. it took a long time to acquire and there is no advantage in pretending you cannot see what you can see.

what is worth staying away from: apologising for being direct with people who benefited from it. warmth and plain speech are not opposites, whatever you were taught.

my advice for today: say one thing plainly today that you would normally soften three times before it leaves your mouth. then notice that the room survives it.

when did you get clear. there is usually a year, and people can usually name it. reply and tell me yours.

/ a story

a situation that turns up more often than you would expect

a woman in her fifties says, quietly and a little guiltily, that she does not know who she is now the role is over. the mother of small children, the wife of a man with a demanding job, the daughter who managed everything. the role finished, and the person underneath turned out to be less obvious than expected.

the eight of pentacles. it carries long practice at one thing. what it means here is that she has a highly developed identity, built for a job that no longer exists, and that is a far better problem than having none.

the hanged man. it carries the suspended stretch, the part with no name yet. what it means here is that the in-between has work of its own, and the work is mostly unlearning the habit of being useful before she is allowed to be anything else.

the ace of cups. it carries a beginning that arrives as a feeling rather than a plan. what it means here is that the new thing usually announces itself as mild interest rather than as a calling, and mild interest is easy to dismiss when you are expecting something more dramatic.

the reason this belongs on a friday. she keeps looking for the answer in the shape of another role, because roles are what she has had, and the thing that actually turns up is smaller. a class, a language, a saturday habit, one person she starts talking to properly. it does not look like an identity for about a year, and then it does.

reply and tell me which role finished. i would like to know what came after it, if anything has yet.