Sobriety Through the Major Arcana
Christy Tending consults her tarot deck as she reviews her years in recovery.
The Fool
Fresh start, innocence, spontaneity, free spirit
I am a newborn at thirty-seven. I own a home. I have a child. And my first toddling step is admitting I have a problem: I am powerless and my life has become unmanageable. This actually happened well before I managed to get sober, because from what I now know about myself, once I had to start managing my drinking, the jig was up. The need for scaffolding to protect myself from my drinking was a sign that it was already unmanageable.
My drinking was ungovernable, a force unto itself.
In the first days, I wobbled. I did not feel free. I did not feel innocent. This is the beginning I did not want.
None of this will be linear.
The Magician
Bold action, manifestation, resourcefulness, power
I gather my mentors and assemble my toolkit. I buy books, gather my tarot decks, and read poetry. I text my sponsor and go for walks and buy myself flowers and make lists and track my days.
Writing my sobriety—that is, creating narrative and meaning and something tangible from it—becomes an immediate part of my process. It is part of how I have made sense of this intergenerational box of shit I have inherited, and tried to turn it into something useful for someone else. In the first days, I wrote into my rage and my grief and my confusion and my obliterated sense of self.
I write hermit crabs and lists and braids of what I want to tell you, chasing my own tail, dizzyingly sober. Immediately, I want to make it count for something. I use meditation and tarot as an anchor, with immediate reflection. And now, how do you feel? And now, what is arising? And now, who is here from the spirit world to guide you?
Sobriety becomes an incantation, a summoning spell. I gather bird feathers and selenite. I keep my pocketknife close.
Once I had to start managing my drinking, the jig was up. The need for scaffolding to protect myself from my drinking was a sign that it was already unmanageable.
The High Priestess
Sacred intuition, divine feminine, subconscious mind
The High Priestess card tells me to buy several maxi-length caftans in which I might spend my early days of sobriety swanning; and I do. I sit in meditation and glide about the house. I parent my two-year-old kid and do little else but look decadent. This is the scaffolding necessary to go deeper. I white-knuckle it, trusting what is divine and unseen.
My addiction did its best to explain. To show me. Here, it said, is your rage. Here is your grief. Here is everything that was hidden. You believed you were protecting yourself. There is much to unlearn.
I walk into the darkness again and again.
The Empress
Abundant beauty, femininity, nature, nurturing
The hummingbirds start showing up. The bottle brush trees in the side yard explode into coral-red plumes and the hummingbirds arrive to sip from their abundance.
Their bodies, a flicker of color; their joyous beauty, a sign.
The Emperor
Conventional authority, establishment, structure
I spent most of my first day of “sobriety” hungover, having a panic attack because I needed to quit drinking and I wasn’t sure who I was without it. When I sobered up, I downloaded a sobriety tracker app and pulled out my tarot deck. Tell me the answer, I plead.
I discovered I could not bear another voice inside my head telling me I was an untrustworthy fuck-up. All I had been handed by trusted hands of authority over the years were reasons to keep drinking, excuses, and (occasionally) mockery. How dare you? the voice of authority asked. You don’t have a real problem. You only drink after your child goes to bed. You only have a couple (few) glasses of wine a night.
Writing my sobriety—that is, creating narrative and meaning and something tangible from it—becomes an immediate part of my process. It is part of how I have made sense of this intergenerational box of shit I have inherited, and tried to turn it into something useful for someone else.
The Hierophant
Traditional wisdom, religious beliefs, conformity, institutions
I have a difficult relationship with The Hierophant. In one deck, it’s a crow, with a key, surrounded by lightning. In others, he looks rather like a cross between The Hermit and The Magician. The Hierophant has to do with doctrine: something masculine, formal, traditional. Everything I ache to leave behind.
I resist structure. But The Hierophant can also have to do with counsel or mentorship. I text my teacher and she gives me a meditation to do for forty days. She tells me to journal about what comes up in the meditation. I took to the sobriety narratives that feel like home. I begin to write my own.
The Lovers
Harmonious love, alignment, relationships, choices
One: I tell my partner I have to quit drinking. For good, I say. He tells me to start with thirty days to see how it goes. I’ll do it with you, he says. Without this, I wouldn’t have made it. This is love.
Two: The pink cloud is the greatest thing I have ever experienced. For the first six months of my sobriety, I was in love with the world. I felt like a porous being of pure light and everything was magnificent.
The Chariot
Success-driven, control, determination, forward action
There is no such thing as willpower in sobriety. There is today. There is forward action. There is the determination not to drink today. There is the success of one day at a time. This hour and the next, until it consumes fewer thoughts and less energy to claim each day a victory.
There is: let go or be dragged.
Strength
Compassionate strength, courage
In my many decks, the Strength card features a magnificent lion.
What I wished for most, when I first got sober, was for someone—anyone—who would have taken me by the shoulders, knelt down and looked me in the eye, like I was a child, and whispered, “Stop. Put it down.” The next best thing was when I did, finally, I was met with tremendous kindness.
And yet, this flavor of strength is lonely. This belongs to me. It is mine to carry, and there are many who still do not understand my decision. I did not do this for them. I will not explain it. I keep moving.
I spent most of my first day of “sobriety” hungover, having a panic attack because I needed to quit drinking and I wasn’t sure who I was without it.
The Hermit
Solitary endeavors, soul-searching, inner guidance
When I started writing about my drinking and my sobriety, I longed to write myself into a revelation. Where had it all gone wrong? Why didn’t I see this coming?
In several of my decks, the hermit card contains imagery of light in the darkness. A glimmer of hope on the horizon, no matter how solidary and mysterious the figure on the card appears. Within the solitude and seeking, there is a light.
When I decided to stop drinking, I pulled back: having to disclose my sobriety felt tender like a bruise. I needed time for introspection and digestion before I could process it into something others could hear. I needed to listen to my inner guidance, rather than the input of others.
Wheel of Fortune
A turning point, karma, life cycles, fate
I was looking for a turning point, an inciting incident, and, most of all, a person (not me!) with whom I could place the blame. I struggled to make sense of this problem I believed was of my own making.
I struggled against the idea this could be my destiny. Yet, this is part of my karma in this lifetime: my path to negotiate and my action to take. This is part of the trauma leftover from past generations they could not, for whatever reason, untangle.
This is mine to burn. This turning point is mine alone. Here, I will steer the family I am helping to lead—the immediate family of me, my husband, and our child—in a new direction.
Justice
Even-handed truth, law, fairness
I spent a long time bargaining. This is not my mess to clean up. Things aren’t that bad. This isn’t fair. (Feel free to picture me stomping around like a pouting toddler.)
The drinking and addiction issues in my family are not my fault. But my drinking was my responsibility. I needed the lineage of suffering to end with me. Until I became a mother, I had no idea what was consuming me—not until I could see it, a couple of decades from now, coming for my kid.
This is the law of the universe: what we do not repair in this lifetime is left for future generations. In my lineage, this ends with me, here and now. I do not need my child to avoid drinking for my sake. The purpose is to give him a choice I never felt I had.
The Hanged Man
Surrendering, pause, letting go, new perspective
Eventually, I felt ready to tell my story.
Here, I said. Have some perspective. Perhaps you, too, are deluding yourself. Which is not to say I expect anyone to listen. I know from firsthand experience trying to convince someone else they have a problem rarely works. I know this because, until the morning I looked in the mirror and decided I wanted to stop killing myself from alcohol, I wouldn’t have listened either. And yet, as soon as I put down the booze, sobered up, stopped shaking, and got past counting my sobriety in hours, I started writing about it. Which filled me with so much shame and regret and self-loathing that all I wanted to do was drink an entire bottle of wine.
The Hanged Man is about freedom. The surrender of turning yourself upside down to gain a new view on things. My new view was clarity, freedom, the quiet pause of my own inner being.
This is the law of the universe: what we do not repair in this lifetime is left for future generations. In my lineage, this ends with me, here and now. I do not need my child to avoid drinking for my sake. The purpose is to give him a choice I never felt I had.
Death
Metamorphosis, endings, change, transition
Death is an invitation. It beckons to you, its bony hand outstretched, telling you your ego still needs killing. It hands you the sword.
I cannot do sobriety in half-measures. I have begged and pleaded, bargained and grieved. There is no day by the pool perfect enough that I can have a beer, casually. There is no Italian cobble stone-street romantic enough that I can have a glass of wine with my pasta. This is the end of all of it. I have chosen to annihilate my ego so I might live. I have chosen to strike down each threat to my sobriety so this might end with me.
Some things are worth killing. Some things deserve to be burned to the ground.
Temperance
Balanced action, moderation, patience
Temperance invites us into relationship with balance: often pouring from one cup into another. It did not matter from which cup I drank. There was no moderation kind enough. Every time I tried to manage it, to walk a middle path, I fell.
Temperance stands with one foot on the ground, one foot in water. I choose to step onto dry land. I choose the earth: the element of playing the long game, of persistence. It is tempting to find a middle path: one that includes asterisks or reasonable exemptions. Temperance is not sobriety.
I like when Temperance invites us to stabilize our energy. I am choosing an equilibrium that will keep me alive.
The Devil
Addiction, the shadow self, attachment, restriction
What I did not expect was how angry and resentful I would feel when I quit drinking. Among the pink clouds, there was a sincere grief I needed to look in the face: I did not want to stop. I did not want this lesson or the ego-annihilating confrontation of my shadow self. I did not want to slice my attachments to shreds.
And yet.
The Devil shows me where the work is. The deeper I choose to go, the deeper my power. The more I release my shame, the more I return to myself.
The Tower
Destruction, chaos, awakening, revelation
The Tower card often depicts a spire reaching for the sky that’s been cut down, often destroyed by lightning.
And this, much to my chagrin, was part of the process. I was learning to confront myself without the flimsy armor of alcohol I thought had been protecting me all those years. I was not a pillar of strength, but a beacon destroyed. What I haven’t explained to you is how much alcohol wasn’t protecting me from anything. It wasn’t numbing or quieting shit. It was more like a train passing that drowns out the music. When the train is gone, the music plays on, coming back to its full volume.
You understand, I was tired of being run over by the train.
The Star
Renewed hope, faith, purpose, patience
I haven’t told you about the SoCo lime shots or the time on Polk Street. It wouldn’t make a difference if I did. There is no anecdote that could tell the truth on its own. There is no consensus about what the truth is. Simply: I will not drink today. This is my prayer and my commitment. This does not make for an interesting narrative, and I want to build a narrative from this. To know where it started, how it ended, to weave the fibers together in between so that, somehow, inexplicably, it was all worth it. I want something to hang my hope on, but this is the best I can do:
I wanted to drink today, but I did not.
Emerging from the pink cloud will break your heart. I was reborn, of course. Into not just sobriety, but into the shape of my new life. This is where wonder fades and the diligent inner voice takes control.
The Moon
Intuitive knowing, subconscious, fear, anxiety
The Moon symbolizes the dream world, but can also foretell anxiety. When pulled in reverse, this card invites us to release our fear. The first thirty days of sobriety are a milestone: full moon cycle away from what held us for so long.
Now, I track my sobriety by the plum tree in the backyard: white blooms, purple fruit, red leaves, and gray, naked branches. Year after year. But until I was ready for a cycle that size, I followed the moon.
There is no way to slice open the mystery before it is ready.
The Sun
Joyful action, positivity, warmth, fun
When I am not staring at my sobriety-tracking app, I let the sun kiss my face. Freckles form in no time. I spend my days darting in and out of the redwoods, exhausting myself.
Judgment
Rebirth, absolution, inner knowledge
Emerging from the pink cloud will break your heart. I was reborn, of course. Into not just sobriety, but into the shape of my new life. This is where wonder fades and the diligent inner voice takes control.
I wasn’t diving to the bottom of the glass anymore, I was drowning. And yet, it looked like synchronized swimming: all of us, in unison, trying to put space between the brutality of the world and our nervous system’s reaction to it.
There is rebirth, yes, an anniversary of a new self, created by chipping away what no longer belonged to us, shedding our old skin as we slither into the woods.
The World
Completion of a cycle, integration, accomplishment, achievement
At 10 months sober, I ask a teacher for advice. This teacher tells me: at five years sober, you have an 80% chance of staying sober. Your chances don’t improve after that. Until you are five years sober, he says, just try to not drink. After that, you have as good a chance as you ever will of maintaining your sobriety.
Until then, your work is just not to drink today.
There is no completion. There is no over. Each day is a chance to try again.
The work is to fall in love with ourselves as we fall in love with the world: in its imperfection and impermanence.
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