Suspend Me

mirror mirror on the wall...

I’ve spent years refusing to say the name.

Top row: Giger's, Starman, Mystical Manga, Game of Thrones, Oceanic, Spiritsong. Middle row: phantomise, Music, Spoopy, Tarot for Kids, Starspinner, Magic, Wander's. Bottom row: Rider Waite Smith, Movie, Beautiful Creatures, Modern Witch, Cosmic, Pastel Prism, Tarot De Luz. Outlier: World's Tiniest

The Hanged Man. One of those cards whose name earns it a bad rap — or one I’ve handed a bad rap to. Hanging carries such an evil context, especially in this country, that I could never get past the mismatch between the name and what the card actually means. So I stopped saying it. I called it anything else, until the Tarot for Kids deck handed me one that fit: Patience.

And I told myself that was the whole problem. The name.

It wasn’t.

Here’s the part I never said out loud: being suspended is the one surefire way I regulate. I have a big saucer swing, and hanging in it is genuinely so calming. As a kid I hung upside down off monkey bars, trees, the backs of couches — anywhere I could. I didn’t know why. I just always loved a change in perspective.

I was sitting upside down on the couch the first time I saw Mork from Ork sitting upside down on the couch.

Handstands, headstands, cartwheels, the uneven bars. Rocking, swinging, tapping, fidgeting. I loved all of it, and I was ashamed of all of it, because I was afraid of anything that made me seem autistic. I didn’t know it was autism I was shaming. I only knew that good little girls sat still and upright.

Just suspend me. In air, in water, in time. If only just a moment of it.

But here’s what I actually learned this week — sitting with the card, and then sitting with my therapist:

There are two kinds of suspension, and I’m split between them.

There’s the physical kind. Hanging upside down, the saucer swing, the repetitive motion I’ve always found swoon-worthy. That’s how I regulate. I’m great at it.

And there’s the other kind. Patience, surrender, sitting still in the pause, waiting, letting go. That’s what the Hanged One actually means. And it’s the thing I’m genuinely bad at.

So I didn’t just hate a phrase or an image. I hated the card because it holds a mirror up to a real weak spot — the patience and surrender I can’t do. The picture looks exactly like my regulation. The meaning is exactly the discipline I lack. Same word — suspension — opposite relationship.

Which is why Patience is the name that finally fit. Not because it softens the card. Because it names the exact thing I struggle with.

The card I spent my whole life avoiding is a self-portrait. And it turns out she isn’t hanging there in crisis. She chose this. She’s showing me the view I can’t reach from where I’m standing.

Hang here a minute, she says. Be patient. Be kind to yourself.

I’m working on it.