“The Hanged One,” in my DIAGRAM 20th anniversary tarot deck, features, like many but not all of the cards in this deck, a poem and no pictures. By Stephanie Burt and Rachel Gold, the poem is stark black on white, set in two columns that require you to read over the gap—the language slides left to right to left, not elevator-style—building a bridge with trust and tongue. Invisible and full of hope as Wonder Woman’s jet.
I have a tiny black home-cropped top with Wonder Woman, vintage comic book style, standing in front of a giant splashy WANTED poster of her own face. Her speech bubble reads in text beginning to crack from wear and wash, “If this is a nightmare, why don’t I wake up?”
I pulled The Hanged One/Man because I wanted to know what my nightmare was exactly, and how to wake up. That isn’t how I phrased the question, though. I asked first, “What is the shape of the hole that I am in?” thinking always of Anne Boyer’s holes that resemble the grave but are not, and drew the Five of Wands, rife with division and discordance and pain. Then, “What is the shape of the ladder that will allow me to climb out?”
I am to become tangled in the serpentine rungs of a rope ladder, blood rushing to my head, accepting the blurring of my vision and the rope burn around my unstable ankle. I am to submit, accept, sink into discomfort, and treasure this new perspective on the hole.
In this world and others I’m one / of the experts on vertigo, goes the card’s poem, and I laugh. For years, I was wrong about what vertigo was, because my dad was wrong about what vertigo was. He thought and he told me that vertigo was the all-consuming impulse to jump from a great height. Eventually I learned about intrusive thoughts and taught this information to him in turn. Eventually, I had my first bout of real vertigo, waking to a spinning blue room that would not leave no matter how many times I closed my eyes and wished it away. Maybe if I’d had any candles or dandelion fluff to blow on—but words and want are not enough, and neither is closing yourself off to the reality of things so hard that you see pink from blood vessels hitting sun.
Maybe I don’t build a bridge when I read, I have learned my own mind, / rough, bruised, and full of fear, instead leaping that slash-space in a single bound. Taking a risk that sounds unnecessary but feels like flight. In the Terminator franchise, when you jump across years, you can’t bring anything with you that isn’t 100% organic matter, or at least encased in organic matter like a terminator’s metal skeleton. No clothes, no glasses or other external aids for living. No weapons, no candles, but I guess yes to dandelions. You emerge from crackling blue light stripped to the porous vulnerability of your skin, surrounded by the puff of dandelion seedlings blown loose into the future, and still filled to the brim with fear. It is not the escape it may appear to be.
This false trapdoor is part of the premise of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Cameron, a terminator resembling a teenage girl, takes Sarah and John Connor by the hands and leaps them nakedly from the nineties to 2007. This is in order to skip over the point in the original timeline where Sarah died from cancer. Sarah is, however, still in the same body that originally killed her in 2005. She lives out the rest of the series knowing that the potential for cancer is buried beneath her skin, waiting for the right lunar phase, right new exposure to cell phone radiation, right who-can-know-what; something will beckon outsized, weaponized growth to the surface, she knows.
Since I was fourteen and had my first seizure, I have been attempting to outrun the contents of my body. Or was it since I was thirteen and had my first intense panic attack, sobbing and feverish and laughing hysterically? Twelve and stopped sleeping? We can keep looking further over my shoulder, pull out the binoculars and begin identifying species of malfunction by their wingspans, but the point is: I feel like I have been running for a very long time, and I am not sure how to keep doing so. The tarot tells me this is fine. It doesn’t say, The only way out is through. The only way out is stillness, acceptance. The only way out is in, is here.
At nineteen shading into twenty, I canvassed for Southern Poverty Law Center, standing on different sidewalks across Western Massachusetts and soliciting donations for the org’s “anti-bullying” campaign. In downtown Amherst, a man named John, white with black sunglasses and a baseball cap, once talked to me for an hour straight about how the key to solving bullying was arming teachers with machine guns—I really have to talk to supporters who want to donate money, John, I’d tell him with a grin, and he’d tell me, Hold your horses, I have money for you, just be patient.
At one point in the roiling conversation from which I could not figure out how to jump ship, he shifted focus to The Terminator, not knowing that this was my favorite movie. With no idea of the NO FATE inked on my ribcage, he asked, “Do you remember when little Linda Hamilton says to Kyle Reese, she says, ‘What are your women like?’ Do you remember what he says?”
I obligingly filled in the blank: “Good fighters.”
“Good fighters. And you are, in the future.”
It was like he’d yanked my guts into a new shape. Long after my supervisor rescued me by seeking me out for our lunch break, they still occupied this unfamiliar geometric space. In EMT training, we were always told with eviscerations to never try to put the guts back in yourself, because you’ll get the puzzle wrong. He got the puzzle wrong, yet here I was, still moving.
I was scared the whole conversation. Scared he’d pull a gun on me. Scared of the ghost of the boy who pulled a gun on my best friend in second grade while I sat beside her because we told him that the Blair Witch wasn’t real and he hadn’t seen her in the New Jersey forest (Say I saw her). Most of all, I was scared of the “you,” maybe meant only to (correctly, at the time) assign me to the “women” category but coming off more pointed. An arrow shot straight through my defiantly tattooed ribs and sailing forward into the unknown, tugging.
Nothing could come with me but my skin and its insides. Nothing but my bodymind would make me a good fighter.
The Hanged Man/One, here in the future, says not to fight. To be fair to John—which I hesitate to do—this might be because I’m no longer a woman, Wonder or otherwise. John’s “you” was misplaced, and, “If this is a nightmare, why don’t I wake up?” is not my question to ask. I don’t wake up because waking up is not the way out.
Dreaming last night, I was in the church I grew up attending. The woman giving a sermon asked the congregation to participate by naming the things we carry with us, “in our skin.” I was the last to go—in a trembling voice deeper than it ever sounds in my memories, I named, “Unshakeable fear.” She ended by projecting an image of the Moon on the sanctuary’s ceiling, full of holes as my own skin. Waking up did not remove me from this dream. Still: fear, holes, prayer, which is another name for writing this.
I recently went on a date to watch The Blair Witch Project in a theater, and neither of us thought it was an effectively scary movie. Strange, after two decades carrying around a terror tied to the witch’s name, to be so unimpressed. So you heard strange things in the woods at night; that’s just what happens in the woods at night. Rough-hewn abandoned art projects are what happens in the woods too.
On the other hand, violent thrashing is just what happens when you’re in my body; creeping paranoia and gore are just what happen when you’re in my brain; I still find myself finding these things scary as hell—maybe not individually, but the cumulative effect of them, the meaning of their presence, keeping my pace as I run. Should I be scared, though? The tarot says cut that the fuck out. Allie X, opening my playlist for The Hanged Man, says, “Gonna bake and make your dinner, be your cook / You can bring home the bacon, chop the wood,” and has said elsewhere that the song is not about a romantic relationship, but about making concessions to the darker parts of herself so that both of them can survive. Each part has its part to play.
This is what I ultimately mean when I ask for the shape of the ladder that will get me out of this hole. What does it look like to survive? It means every part surviving, even the hole, which was born from my body, grew on my skin and then cleaved free to hold me as I swing like the pendulum in a grandfather clock, like the giant pendulum in Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, like the pendulum of my heart in my chest. Anything that keeps time, steady and ongoing, no skipping, no need to worry about what is and is organic, and the letting go, and deaths that should have been. No need to only wish on a dandelion. I’ll wish on a candle and my nervous system at the same time. I’ll wait as both burn.