There's a particular brand of disorientation that comes with perimenopause—not quite illness, not quite wellness, but something stranger: your body speaking a language you thought you knew, now full of unfamiliar syntax. You wake at 3 a.m. drenched and disoriented. Words you've used your whole life hide just behind your teeth. Your temperature regulation becomes unreliable in ways that feel both trivial and violating.

The medical establishment will offer you terminology—vasomotor symptoms, cognitive fog, mood lability—as if naming the thing might tame it. The wellness industry will sell you solutions, as if this transition were simply a problem to be optimized away.

But what if perimenopause isn't a malfunction at all? What if it's a threshold—the body dismantling one version of itself to make room for another, and you just happen to be conscious during the demolition?

There's a particular way you start holding yourself when pain becomes constant—not the obvious wincing or limping, but something subtler, something that lives in your jaw and your shoulders and the space between your breath. A tightness that started as protection and became your posture. A bracing that began as survival and turned into the only way you know how to exist in your body anymore.

The Four of Pentacles shows a figure clutching a coin to their chest, feet planted on two more, crown balanced on the fourth. They're holding on so tightly that nothing can move—not the coins, not their body, not the city visible in the background that they've turned away from.

This is what chronic pain does: it turns your body into something you have to manage instead of something you get to live in. You start rationing energy like currency because you never know how much you'll have tomorrow. You grip control over your body because your body stopped being trustworthy, and if you can't trust it, you have to manage it, contain it, never let it surprise you with how badly it can hurt.

There's a version of hope that arrives after you've stopped believing in it—not the kind that lights you up with possibility, but the kind that shows up quiet and unremarkable on a Tuesday morning when you manage to get out of bed before noon, when you answer one email without spiraling, when you water a plant you forgot you owned. The kind that doesn't feel like hope at all, just the stubborn, unglamorous fact of still being here.

The Star appears in tarot readings after The Tower, after everything falls apart, and everyone treats it like this gentle, renewing card—like hope is supposed to feel good, like it's supposed to inspire you. But what if you're standing in the aftermath of burnout, staring at The Star, and feeling absolutely nothing? What if hope feels more exhausting than despair because it requires you to believe something could be different, and you're not sure you have that in you anymore?

This is The Star for people who don't trust hope, who've learned that caring too much about work gets you burned, who wake up and can't remember what they used to want.

There's a version of strength that nobody warns you about—the kind that comes after you've survived something you didn't think you could survive. You've been hurt, rebuilt yourself, learned to trust your instincts, set better boundaries, wised up to the warning signs. You're not naive anymore. You know what people are capable of. You've earned your wariness, and you wear it like a second skin.

And then one day you realize: the armor you built to survive has become the cage you're living in.

The Nine of Wands shows up in that exact moment—when your hypervigilance has become your baseline, when your boundaries have calcified into walls, when you're so good at protecting yourself that you've forgotten what it feels like to be unguarded. This isn't a card about paranoia. It's about the aftermath—what happens when survival mode never quite turns off, and how to finally, carefully, let your guard down.

When care becomes your identity, love turns into labor. The Empress reversed reveals the quiet burnout beneath overgiving—the part of you that confuses being needed with being loved. This is a story about reclaiming rest, trust, and the right to be cared for too.

Confused by the old dudes in Tarot? This post unpacks the distinct archetypes of The Emperor, The Hierophant, and the Kings—exploring structure, tradition, and power through a lens of healing and personal growth. A must-read for anyone navigating authority with nuance (or side-eye).